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LETTERS WRITTEN 
HOME FROM FRANCE 

IN THE FIRST HALF OF 191 5 
By A. PIATT ANDREW 



LETTERS WRITTEN 
HOME FROM FRANCE 

IN THE FIRST HALF OF 19 15 
By A. PIATT ANDREW 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 
1916 



Zfl 



COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HELEN M. ANDREW 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



V 

I 26 1916 
2>CI.A433501 






TO 



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OF THESE LETTERS 

ONLY TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY COPIES HAVE BEEN 

PRINTED FOR DISTRIBUTION AMONG PERSONAL FRIENDS. 

THIS COPY IS NUMBER 



" France beloved of every soul that loves or serves its kind" 

Rudyard Kipling. 



PREFACE 

Although so many Americans are giving heart and energy 
to the effort of lightening in some way the suffering of 
Europe, only a small proportion has chosen to take a part 
within the line of action. Those of us who have any one we 
care for there in the midst of it all know that, like men who 
go to explore mysterious distances, they are generally very 
much beyond our horizon for months at a time — at least 
as regards correspondence. An intense sympathy for the 
purpose they have gone to serve makes news of them doubly 
welcome when it does come. Believing that those who have 
pleasant memories of the writer of these letters would be 
interested in reading these impressions written home, his 
mother and father have generously consented to put them 
into this form. 

Having by affiliation with the work in which he is engaged 
a detailed knowledge of the circumstances surrounding it, 
it devolves upon me to say in justice that these pages give 
little idea of the very difficult task their author has suc- 
cessfully accomplished. Largely through his perseverance 
against great odds the American Ambulance Field Service, 
working constantly under fire along the whole western battle 
front, has become a very distinguished organization, trusted 
and relied upon by the armies of France. Whatever politi- 
cal impressions the French civilian may have gathered in 
regard to us as a nation, through the utterances of misrep- 
resentative individuals, the French soldier, living or dying, 
has now finer evidence of the spirit of our countrymen. 

No man — whether critic or enemy — may challenge the 



valor of France, nor her right to all honor ; so to one who, 
stirred by passionate allegiance to her cause, has brought this 
tribute of our friendship for her to so high a standard, we 
owe truly a debt of gratitude. The opportunity and the will 
to do a work worth while have been spent here to full pur- 
pose. Many a young American who has had a part in this 
service will carry from it an inspiration which is better than 
peace — for having labored among the men and women of 
France he will have known the vision of supreme sacrifice. 

H. D. S. 
Gloucester, May, 1916. 



LETTERS FROM FRANCE 



LETTERS FROM FRANCE 



12 West 51st Street, New York, 

December 3, 1914. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have been turning things over in my mind lately and have 
about decided that I must go over to France for a few 
months. There are many reasons for doing so, the possibility 
of having even an infinitesimal part in one of the greatest 
events in all history — the possibility of being of some serv- 
ice in the midst of so much distress — the interest of wit- 
nessing some of the scenes in this greatest and gravest of 
spectacles — and above all the chance of doing the little all 
that one can for France. 

You need not fear, if I go, that I shall expose myself to any 
serious risks. If I can I should like to get attached to the 
ambulance service, or, if that is impossible, to one of the 
relief commissions (to help, perhaps, in looking after the dis- 
tribution of food and relief in some French town, — or some- 
thing of the sort). But I shall not get in the way of the 
armies. What do you think about it? 

Is n't it a great chance ? Is n't it a piece of good fortune 
that I happen to be free in this great moment of history? 
And is n't it worth while to make some sacrifice in order to 
have one's little share in the great events that are going 
on? 

I have been staying for a day or so at the Davisons', and 
am going back to Gloucester on Friday. 

CO 



II 

Gloucester, Massachusetts, 

December ly, 1914. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

Only a line or two to tell you 'how happy and busy I am. 
As I telegraphed you, I have heard from Mr. Bacon and have 
arranged to join the American Ambulance. I have bought a 
whole equipment of sheep-lined coats and vests, even Jaeger 
underwear, — which I never dreamed that I should come to, 
— and also a heavy sleeping-bag, which I shall probably 
never use, but which ought to be serviceable in case we 
should have to sleep out of doors on cold nights. 

I got a fine letter this morning from Ambassador Jusser- 
and. I have also ventured to write to Mr. Herrick and Colo- 
nel Roosevelt for letters which might be of service in some 
unforeseen emergency and which probably will await me at 
the steamer. The time is so short and I am so busy. Don't 
worry about me. Remember I have a strong body and I sel- 
dom mind the cold, — and for that matter I have every 
known device for keeping the cold out. Remember, too, that 
I am doing the thing I want most to do and am very happy 
in the thought of it. 



i*i 



Ill 

On the train Boston to New York, 

December i8 y 1914.. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

The feverish three or four days of preparation are over, 
and the story is about to begin. I have every known variety 
of clothing to protect against the cold, packed in a steamer 
trunk, a valise, and a suit-case. 

Last night I motored up to Boston and had a farewell 
dinner with Mrs. Gardner in Fenway Court. We talked for 
hours, just we two alone, wondering much what the future 
had in waiting, and then about eleven I went down to the 
theatre, picked up my friend, Leslie Buswell, and we bundled 
into our woollen helmets, opened the throttle, and tore to 
Gloucester, imagining that we were in the war zone and had 
a message to deliver to General Joffre which must reach 
headquarters before 1 a.m. "Madame" had a nice supper 
awaiting us at one o'clock before the open fire in my upstairs 
study, and there we talked and talked and talked almost 
until dawn. 

So ended 19 14 for me in Gloucester, a dear evening spent 
alternately with two good friends (Y and L. B.), and now 
here I am, more eager than I have ever been for anything, 
headed for the land I love next to my own — awaiting what- 
ever the future may have in store. 

I expect to meet other friends to-night in New York. To- 
morrow morning I get my steamer passage, letter of credit, 
etc., and at 3 p.m. we sail. 



C3] 



IV 

12 West 51st Street, New York, 

December ig, ig 14. 6 p.m. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

I had thought by this time to be on the high seas, as the 
Touraine was scheduled to sail at 3 p.m. ; but instead I am 
sitting on the top of the Davisons' house in their solarium 
preparing to dine with the Davison boys and to go with them 
to the theatre. For some reason, at the last moment the 
Touraine's sailing was postponed until to-morrow. 

We were all on the boat, — Harry Sleeper came on un- 
expectedly from Boston to see me off and C. B. was down 
there and Mrs. Davison and the dear Davison boys, — and 
all my luggage, and parcels of books and flowers and little 
presents from different people, — and some immense rolls of 
cloth for our uniforms, of which I am to take charge on the 
way to Paris. 

But here we are still in New York! 

In the mean time I have taken a lesson in running a Ford, 
— which is not the easy thing I had imagined it to be. You 
have to do everything contrary as regards pedals and levers 
to what you do with the Packard, and I am glad to have had 
this little chance to learn the rudiments. To-morrow morn- 
ing early I am going down to Long Island with the Davisons, 
and as they have a Ford down there the boys are going to give 
me a lesson and I am to drive the car back to New York. 

The Touraine is a slow boat and is not expected to reach 
Boulogne until Tuesday the 29th. So on Xmas think of me 
as in mid-ocean. I shall not be lonely, as there are various 
friends aboard. I saw Huntington Wilson (who used to be 
Assistant Secretary of State in my Washington days) among 
the passengers, and my roommate on the boat, Charley Ap- 



pleton, is a very nice fellow who graduated at Harvard six 
or seven years ago. 

I hope you are not worried. The possibility of that is the 
only thing about the trip that makes me anxious. For the 
rest, I am keen about the prospect. It is the most worth- 
while thing I have ever done, and the most interesting. 

We expect to sail now on Sunday afternoon. 



A Bord de la Touraine, 

December 20, 1914. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

The steamer is to sail, they say, at 3 p.m. to-day (Sunday). 
It was booked to sail yesterday at the same hour. 

Last evening, I went to the theatre and spent the night 
with the Davisons and to-day I went down to Long Island, 
and drove their little Ford car back to New York, which 
was good practice. 

I also stopped at the Carlton and saw Mr. Herrick, who 
has just returned from France, and who happened to be in 
New York, and from him I got a good deal of information 
about conditions in Paris. I hear from all sides that he has 
been a successful and popular ambassador, and that it was a 
thousand pities he was not allowed to remain as our repre- 
sentative in France. Some of the things he said last autumn 
will certainly be remembered for a long time by the French 
people. When the other ambassadors left for Bordeaux, with 
the President and the Senate and Chamber, Mr. Herrick re- 
mained, saying that " a dead ambassador might be able to 
render a greater service to France and the world than a live 
one " ; subtly implying that if he were killed by the Germans, 
America might come to the aid of France. And when the 
German hordes were almost within cannon range of Paris, he 
touched the hearts of the French people by saying that he 
would do his utmost to prevent the bombardment of their 
beautiful capital, "because Paris belongs not merely to 
France, but to the whole world." The French people must 
have appreciated such apt expressions of friendship in those 
hours of profound apprehension. He has intelligence and heart 
and the bel air. I like him and am sure he merits all the 

£6] 



homage he has received for his handling of conditions in 
Paris. 

Miss Beaux was here at the boat again to see me off at 
i p.m., the proposed hour of sailing, and Harry is still here 
(2 p.m.). He will stay until we actually push off. Heaven 
certainly is kind in the friends that have been given me. 

I found your telegram and letter. I am glad you are not 
sorry that I am going. 

I shall be back almost before you know it. And so once 
more, good-bye. 



VI 

A Bord de la Touraine, 

December 21, 1914. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

We have ploughed along through gray rain and rough seas 
all day, and, as it is the shortest day of the year and we are 
up around the Grand Banks, the night shut in soon after 
four o'clock. I have dozed in my steamer chair most of the 
day, and shall do the same during the eight or nine days to 
follow. Unless some German cruiser gives us chase, there 
promises to be little diversion. 

The Touraine may have been a "floating palace" in the 
palmy eighties, but she could not be so regarded to-day. She 
is comfortable and cozy and fairly clean, but seems more like 
a river steamer than an ocean liner. There are less than 
thirty passengers aboard, and most of them are Frenchmen 
going back to join the army. 

We have a little table of five. Most of the men who had 
agreed to come backed down at the last moment, so there 
are only four men and one woman aboard bound for the 
American Ambulance, although it is expected that more will 
follow by later steamers. There is a Yale graduate named 
Richardson, somewhat over forty, I should say, — of a rather 
serious, and inquiring turn of mind, — a dependable type. 
There is a young Harvard graduate named Rumsey, perhaps 
twenty-seven or thereabouts, short, red-haired, a member of 
the Porcellian Club at Harvard. He used to play football at 
Harvard, has lived on ranches in the West, is a tightly knit 
little athlete with, I should imagine, no end of courage and 
a zest for adventure. There is another young Harvard man 
of about the same age named Charley Appleton, a cousin of 
the Meyers', who lives in Ipswich in the summer and in New 

C«3 



York in the winter. I knew him at Harvard. Then there is 
a trained nurse from Cambridge, — a woman of perhaps 
thirty to thirty-five, — a nice little woman taking her first 
trip across, and full of interest in the great adventure. She 
will probably teach us everything we need to know about 
"first aid" on the way over. 

We have a small table by ourselves, and are probably des- 
tined to get very well acquainted as time goes on. No one 
seems to know exactly what he is to do when he gets over, 
but they are all expecting to help carry wounded soldiers to 
and from the hospitals in the immediate rear of the lines. 
Perhaps they may spend their first weeks carting beds and 
groceries from Paris to Neuilly. That would certainly be 
less interesting, however useful it might be. 



VII 

A Bord de la Touraine, 

December 25, 1914. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Often to-day my thoughts have run back over fifteen 
hundred miles of trackless water and one thousand miles of 
land to you all happily gathered about the Christmas tree. 
It has not been a forlorn day for me. Here in the middle of 
the Atlantic we have not quite realized that it was Christmas. 
We had a little snow last night and quite a gale, but to-day 
the sun has shone most of the day, the air has been mild, 
and it is only when one closes one's eyes tight that one can 
really believe that this is the day of days in the whole year's 
calendar and that snowy landscapes and ice probably prevail 
over most of the United States. This afternoon they had 
"sports" and races on the deck. My name appeared on the 
programme by some one's mischievous suggestion, but I did 
not perform. We shall not land in Havre until Tuesday the 
28th, and shall not reach Paris until the 30th. Meanwhile 
we are steaming along the ocean lane, guarded, the captain 
says, by British cruisers about twenty miles away on either 
side just over the horizon. 

I have enjoyed having Huntington Wilson aboard, and 
what questions relative to the universe, past, present, and 
future, have not been settled, or at least dissected, by us 
it would be hard to find. 



O] 



VIII 

A Bord de la Touraine, 

December 2Q, 1914.. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Just a word written in my berth late in the last night 
aboard the Touraine. We are skirting the English coast, 
which can be dimly seen out of my porthole in the moonlight 
or can be presumed from the lights along the shore. We 
have had a gay and warm-hearted evening from dinner until 
now at about 1.30 a.m. 

Our little coterie — Huntington Wilson; of whom you 
know; a Hindu prince, with an unpronounceable name and 

a willowy little sprite of an English wife ; Madame , 

the charming, young, and intelligent wife of a French play- 
wright who is not travelling with her; a strange Franco- 
American product named Madame , slender, with 

wild red hair, and wilder than her hair, animated beyond 
anything I have ever seen in any human being; "Larry" 
Rumsey, laconic but quick-witted; Charley Appleton; and a 
pleasant French youth, who has been living in Canada, but 
is bound back to France to join the army, — they all seem 
to-night old acquaintances. Yet few of them had entered into 
each other's previous experience and few will probably have 
any relation with the lives of any of the rest in the future. 
For several days, perhaps because of our common interest in 
the outcome of the war, we have been on very friendly terms, 
have talked endlessly, and played or laughed and even sung 
together. 

To-night, when we "broke up" singing "Tipperary" after 
a long and happy evening of lively talk in French and Eng- 
lish, I am sure we all felt touched with a sense of tenderness 
and regret. 

C»3 



December 2Q. 8.30 a.m. 
We are approaching the French coast. There are all sorts 
of vessels coming and going across the Channel (except 
German vessels). We land about 9.30. 



IX 

Hotel Terminus, Paris, 

December jj, 1914. 10 p.m. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Paris at last! 

We reached the mouth of the harbor at Havre on Tuesday 
morning, but what with the heavy sea and an unfavorable 
tide, the captain did not feel it safe to try and make the 
dock until night. So we steamed tediously around and 
around all day, and it was long after dark when the prow 
finally turned landwards. It was about seven o'clock of a 
moonlit, starlit night when we drew up at the landing. We 
had just time to get across the city to the railway station in 
season to take a night train to Paris, which we were told 
would get us here by one o'clock. We had to show our pass- 
ports to French soldiers at the dock and at the railway 
station, and there were a good many English soldiers, trimly 
dressed in khaki, patrolling the streets (because many of 
the British transports land at Havre), and of course we all 
felt the thrill of setting foot in a country which we loved and 
which was in the throes of an epoch-making war. We bought 
the English and French papers to find what had happened 
while we were at sea, and to help pass the hours on the long 
night trip. There were no sleepers or first-class carriages, and 
most of the train was overflowing with reservists who had 
come over in the steerage of our steamer to join the 
army. 

We did not reach Paris until seven o'clock the next morn- 
ing, and there was practically no sleep during the night. 
The railroads are used at night for transporting the army 
and its supplies, and I suppose the Government did not 
realize what discomfort they were causing us by leaving us 



for hours on sidings. As a matter of fact, it was not an 
altogether dismal night. We got out at many stations and 
talked to the sentinels who were patrolling the frosty tracks 
and platforms; we visited with our steamer friends in the 
other compartments; we read and chatted and argued and 
dozed and sang and finally the morning and Paris arrived. 

That was yesterday morning. And in the mean time we 
have done and seen many things. 

What of Paris ? What impression does one get, who knows 
it well in times of peace, seeing it now in this moment of 
gigantic stress ? I don't know that I had ever tried to picture 
precisely what I ought to expect to see. But I had read that 
the automobiles and taxicabs had all been commandeered 
and taken to the front, and I rather expected it would be 
difficult to get our luggage from the station. I had read so 
much about the size of the armies that I rather supposed 
there would be few men on the streets, and they mostly boys 
or old men. I had read that so many stores had been made 
over into hospitals that I imagined the usual throngs of 
shoppers on the boulevards would be missing, and that many 
window shades would be drawn and many shutters down in 
the shopping districts. In fact, I suppose I had expected to 
find Paris a somewhat deserted city with little traffic of the 
usual character, but with soldiers marching, drums beating, 
cavalry clattering over the pavements. 

Much of this may have been true of Paris in the days of 
mobilization, or in the terrible days of early September, 
when every one thought that it was only a question of days 
or hours when the Germans would occupy the city. But 
whether or not that was the case some months ago, things 
are very different now. As we emerged from the station, the 
usual rows of taxicabs were lined up outside, and as we have 
come and gone about Paris during the last two days it has 
been hard to see that there is any less than the usual number 

c'143 



of taxis or other autos tearing about the streets. Outwardly 
life seems to be going on as usual. The boulevards are lined 
as ordinarily during the holidays with little barracks, where 
Christmas toys are sold, and the sidewalks and department 
stores are thronged as of old with holiday shoppers. We 
walked down by the Seine yesterday afternoon, and the usual 
loafers were fishing from the bridge and embankments, or 
strolling past the old book-dealers who display their second- 
hand wares in boxes along the rail on the left bank of the 
Seine. One sees no marching troops and very few individual 
soldiers. Paris seems as calm and undisturbed as ever. To 
the casual observer it would seem as if the war must be over, 
or only a dream, or in some other country than France. This 
is the really astonishing fact. 

If you look a little more carefully, however, you will notice 
from the posters on the kiosks that few of the theatres are 
open except for performances of a philanthropic or patriotic 
character. If you go down to the Louvre, you will find that 
its doors have been closed to the public for five months. If 
you pass some of the larger hotels, you will find that many of 
them bear Red Cross signs and are evidently used to-day as 
hospitals. If you look for the gay fashionable restaurants 
where frivolity was wont to flourish, you will find them 
closed or sedate and respectable. But above all, if you re- 
gard the women you pass on the street you will note that 
about one in every three wears mourning. 

I don't know that anything has impressed me more than a 
walk which we took late yesterday afternoon through the old 
Quartier Latin, and which ended in the church of St. Etienne 
du Mont. I wanted to go to Notre Dame "to burn a 
candle " for France, but it was closed, so we went on to St. 
Etienne up on the hill near the Pantheon, where the remains 
of Saint Genevieve are entombed in a golden reliquary, a 
quaint old church which I used often to visit in my student 



days. We entered the church when the last twilight was per- 
colating through the stained glass and sat in one of the 
chapels in quasi-darkness for half an hour watching old 
women and young women, dressed in black, as they burned 
their candles about the reliquary and wept and prayed for 
their loved ones who had given all that they had or could 
hope for to France. 

Although Paris is only about seventy miles from the Ger- 
man lines, it is calm and without excitement. The people are 
utterly confident that the Germans are helpless so far as 
Paris is concerned. Moreover, they are confident that, cost 
what it may cost, they are going to win. They realize that 
the war must last indefinitely. They know that more and 
more of their boys have got to die. There are six hundred 
thousand of them, I am told, at present in the hospitals! 
They know how terrible the price of victory must be, but life 
without it — life under German domination — would be un- 
supportable, and they are ready to pay the cost. This is all I 
can write now. Next time, I shall try to tell you something 
about the Ambulance. 

Good-night! 



X 

p rue Angelique Fevien, N euilly-sur-Seine, 

Thursday night, January 7, 1915. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

A week has passed since I have had a chance to write you, 
a week busy, full of interest, and different from any week I 
have ever spent. 

The main hospital of the American Ambulance (and you 
understand that "Ambulance Americaine" is the name of the 
whole great undertaking, including two large hospitals, many 
ambulances in the narrow sense of the word, and hundreds of 
surgeons, nurses, and attendants) is located in Neuilly, a sub- 
urb northwest of Paris, through which the Germans would 
have passed had they succeeded in getting to Paris in Sep- 
tember. The organizers of the hospital succeeded in per- 
suading the French Government to put at their disposal an 
immense school-building in Neuilly, which was in process of 
erection, the Lycee Pasteur. It is a handsome building of brick 
and stone, built around a courtyard, and what would have 
been schoolrooms, large and well lighted, have become wards 
of the hospital, or dormitories for the nurses, or dining-rooms 
for the great staff of doctors, ambulance drivers, nurses, and 
orderlies, not less than three hundred and fifty — probably 
more. One wing of the hospital is devoted to the transporta- 
tion service and includes rooms for the staff of this depart- 
ment, a guardroom for the drivers and orderlies, rooms for 
those in charge of supplies, and a big garage. Here and in the 
neighboring yard the various squads of ambulances are 
equipped, which are to go to the front at one or another 
point along the five hundred miles of trenches that stretch 
from the British Channel to Switzerland. Several of the auto- 
ambulances run every day between the hospital in Neuilly 

C17] 



and the railway station in Aubervilliers, another suburb of 
Paris, bringing over wounded who have been sent there from 
the front by train.; The principal work of the automobile 
corps, however, has no direct relation to the hospital at 
Neuilly. The corps of drivers and orderlies is grouped in 
squads of about fifteen or eighteen men, who have charge of 
perhaps ten ambulances each, and these squads go out for 
service along "the front," carrying wounded from the field 
dressing-stations to the nearest hospitals. One squad of ten 
autos left yesterday for the neighborhood of Beauvais, an- 
other squad is up near Belgium, in the English lines. My 
squad, as soon as we can get equipped, will leave for some- 
where else. We hope to get off early next week, but we are 
subject to the orders of the French Government and cannot 
know our destination in advance. We shall be gone for an 
indefinite period, sleeping either in the ambulances, or in 
buildings "to which we may be billeted by the army, and 
getting our rations from the army. 

The preparations for such an undertaking involve more 
than you suppose of detail. In the first place, we have to get 
a great variety of papers from the Government, a permit to 
stay in France, a certificate of immatriculation with the 
Prefet de Police, an identity card, a driving-license and 
others, all of which have to be signed and stamped by official 
after official at bureau after bureau. I had to take my driv- 
ing examination yesterday with a fussy and pompous old 
French official, who made me so anxious with his injunctions 
and admonitions that I nearly ran over, first a tram-car, and 
then a flock of sheep, either one of which would have been 
fatal to my hopes, whatever its effect on the car or the 
sheep. In the end he "passed" me, but it took the greater 
part of an afternoon of waiting, driving, backing, stopping, 
turning here and turning there according to his orders. As I 
had never driven a Ford but once or twice in my life, and in 

1^1 



driving a Ford you have to remember not to do anything that 
you have been accustomed to do in driving any other car, you 
can imagine that I was on tenter-hooks. The old boy would 
wait until we got to a crowded corner and suddenly scream, 
"A gauche" (to the left), and then, as I had to dodge trams 
and people crossing the street, he would say, "Ah! too fast! 
too fast! you are like the taxi-drivers, who are assassins." 
After a time I \ discovered that the thing to do to please 
him was to drive all the time as if following a hearse at a 
funeral. And when I tried that I "stalled" my engine 
twice! 

The Ford cars as they arrive have only a chassis, and upon 
them we have a carriage-builder construct a light ambulance 
body capable of carrying three stretchers. We can carry 
three wounded lying down, or five or six sitting up. We have 
to paint these cars ourselves, try them out and adjust them, 
equip them with supplies and tools, take off the tires sent 
with them and put on non-skid tires, etc. I spend most of 
my days kneeling in the mud and practising the business 
of painter, carpenter, chauffeur, and washer in turn. 

Then we have to equip ourselves with uniforms (the or- 
ganizers of the hospital have selected a uniform practically 
identical with the British), with sleeping-bags, blankets, 
water-bottles and a long list of miscellaneous incidentals, 
such as a knapsack, a whistle, two pairs of heavy shoes, 
two khaki-colored shirts, four towels, four pairs of heavy 
socks, two pairs of heavy gloves, etc., etc. It all takes time, 
and involves trips into Paris. 

My section is made up of a fine lot of fellows ; two or three 
were artists in peace time, one an architect in New York, 
some were stock-brokers, some real-estate dealers, some are 
students just out of college; some are millionnaires, some 
paupers. They are like "les cadets de Gascogne." So far 
it seems as if we were preparing for a camping lark in the 



country rather than for serious work with an army in the 
field in the greatest of all wars. 

To-day I lunched with M. and Mme. Puaux and Gaby's 
wife. They were very warm-hearted toward me, said I was 
doing what Lafayette had done, etc. Afterwards I joined 
them toward the end of a matinee at the Theatre Francais. 
(The theatres are mostly closed here except for occasional 
matinees, because the trams and the underground cease 
running at 10 p.m.). The play was "La fille de Madame 
Roland/' a classic piece, and after its close, the curtain rose 
again upon an eighteenth-century scene with the company 
in the costumes of Revolutionary times. In the centre of a 
public square was a statue representing the Republic, deco- 
rated with wreaths and flags, and in the distance drums and 
bugles were playing (the bugle calls, by the way, are very 
like our bugle calls, because, as I am told, they were brought 
over to America from France by Lafayette). Mounet-Sully, 
the great tragedian, now quite an old man, dressed as a cito- 
yen of Revolutionary days in knickerbockers and with a red 
kerchief about his head, was in the crowd, and as a band in 
the distance played the "Marseillaise," he recited in a deep, 
sonorous voice, and as if he were speaking them extemporane- 
ously for the first time, the martial lines of Rouget de Lisle. 
I shall never forget the way he shouted to the crowd: "Aux 
armes! citoyens!" "Marchons! Marchons!" and how the 
distant band repeated the melody after him. There never 
was a more thrilling national song. The audience stood as he 
recited it, and cheered at the end of every verse, and I was 
glad that I was in a dark corner of the box where no one 
could see me. When we came out, I saw Monsieur and 
Madame Puaux wiping away their tears, and many others 
too. Monsieur Puaux and Mounet-Sully were together in the 
war of 1870, and when the curtain fell we went around "be- 
hind" and visited Mounet-Sully in his dressing-room in the 



midst of the faded wreaths that commemorated his triumphs 
of other days. It was worth while to see the two venerable 
friends embracing each other fervently and talking of the 
great days of the Franco-Prussian War. " Souvenez-vous de 
soixante-dix, mon ami?" "Oui, souvenez-vous. " 

My little friend " Gaby " has been for five months in the 
trenches, as a captain of infantry. He was in the battles of 
the Marne and the Somme and most of the other great en- 
gagements. But about two weeks ago he was taken over on 
the General Staff and now is with General Joffre at the 
Grand Quartier General. His family hopes that he may get 
home for a few hours this week, in which case I shall surely 
hope to see him. Rene is in the aviation corps just outside of 
Paris, and I shall arrange to see him too before we go to the 
front. 

The next time I write I will try to tell you something about 
the hospital and some of the tragedies among those I have 
seen in the several wards. There is so much to tell and so 
little time or chance to tell it. 

I am very well, and never have been more happy. 
I have received several letters from America, but none from 
you yet. 



XI 

American Ambulance, Neuilly, 

January 15, IQ15. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

We are still here, but expect to leave any day. I shall never 
forget the two weeks spent working on the cars in the mud of 
the hospital yard. We had no freezing temperature, but they 
say that this is the wettest winter ever known. Every day it 
has drizzled or sprinkled intermittently, and as the 7 grounds of 
the hospital (which was a school in process of erection) had 
never been cleared or covered with gravel or turf, the mud 
everywhere is several inches deep, and in this mud we have 
waded and literally wallowed as we worked about and under 
our cars. I have long since ceased to mind grimy hands and 
boots caked with clayey mud. We do not even bother to have 
the mud brushed off our boots and clothes at night. 

In a dark flannel shirt and overalls I have painted my car 
a gray-blue like the rest, and have painted on it innumerable 
numbers : the number of the car in the ambulance garage, 92 ; 
the number of the army license for the car; the number of the 
Paris license, etc. Then all of our lamps, cans, and articles of 
equipment have had to be painted to match the cars, and 
also to have the car numbers painted on them so that none 
of our fellows can filch them. Seats have had to be built in 
the cars, and straps and hooks arranged to carry reserves of 
water, oil, gasoline, tires, mess-kit, knapsack, blankets, sleep- 
ing-bag, reserves of food, etc., and places have had to be 
sawed and fixed for the two stretchers we are to carry, and a 
place made for the heating pipe connected with the exhaust, 
which will make the ambulance about ten degrees warmer 
than it otherwise would be. Then, as the French wounded are 
supposed to be averse to anything of the nature of a courant 



d'air, we have had to tack wooden strips and canvas over 
every crack and opening. Worst of all, perhaps, we have had 
to change the front wheels on our cars in order to make them 
uniform in size with the rear wheels, and we have had to 
change all the tires. All this has been done out of doors in the 
mud at Neuilly, often in a drizzling rain. 

In the mean time I have been vaccinated for smallpox and 
have had two inoculations for typhoid, both of which gave 
me an unpleasant fever for about twenty-four hours, and I 
have spent hours and hours getting the necessary permits 
and official papers. 

We are equipped and ready to start, and only awaiting 
orders: ten ambulances, a wonderful supply car containing 
every kind of tool and spare part for the autos, with extra 
reserves of food, and a pilot car in which the head of the 
section is to drive ahead of the convoy. Each car bears on its 
sides and rear and on its top (for the benefit of Zeppelins and 
aeroplanes who care to inform themselves) a large red cross, 
and also three flags, those of the United States, France, and 
the Red Cross. We look somewhat like an itinerant circus 
when we run in convoy. 

On Monday morning, according to present plans, we shall 
run in convoy to Dunkirk, to serve a region where there 
has been much artillery fighting, and there we shall remain 
indefinitely. 

We shall receive mail very seldom, only as some one comes 
up from Paris from time to time, and I may not be able to 
send out letters in any other way on account of the censor. 

Dear old M. Puaux, who has three boys at the front, bade 
me an affectionate good-bye yesterday, and gave me a sermon 
in French to read "at the front." He seems as gratified and 
pleased at my doing this work as he would be if all America 
had come over to fight for France. 

It appeals to the French people that so many Americans 



sympathize with them in their tragic hours. The little that 
we in America have actually done seems small, indeed, com- 
pared with the size of the situation, but its main object and 
its main effect is to show to the people of France that we be- 
lieve in them and in the justice of their cause, that we still 
remember what they did for us in the darkest hour of our 
own history, and that, as members of a great sister republic, 
our hearts and hopes are with them in this most unnecessary 
war. 

P.S. Very heavy fighting has been going on these last days 
near Soissons, about forty miles from Paris, and although the 
papers have given only the barest mention of it, the doctors 
in the hospital tell me that twenty-five thousand French 
wounded have passed through Paris during the last two days. 
There were two thousand brought into Aubervilliers last 
night. Aubervilliers is a suburb of Paris, and is a kind of 
distributing station for the wounded. We are to run all our 
ambulances all night to-night between the Aubervilliers rail- 
way station and our hospital, a distance of about ten miles, 
bringing in those who fell to-day. Between twelve and two, 
they serve a nice supper in the hospital for those of us who 
work at night, and that makes the long night somewhat less 
forlorn. 



XII 

American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly, 

Sunday, January iy, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

To-day will live long in my memory, for I drove out to 

and spent several hours with my friend of years ago, 

Gabriel Puaux, who is now on General Joffre's staff. It is not 
supposed to be known, although everybody knows it, that 
the General Staff have been quartered for some time in 

, which is about thirty miles from Paris. The Germans 

passed through there in the terrible days of September, but 
nothing about the famous old chateau or the imposing 
grounds was touched, as the Kaiser is supposed to have in- 
tended to make the place his headquarters. His army was 
driven back, however, and now it is General Joffre and his 

staff who direct affairs from not from the chateau, 

however, for General Joffre lives in a modest little brick villa 
and the staff are quartered in a hotel. It is hard to get a 

pass to because they naturally do not want to be 

disturbed by people who have no business there, and, as a 

matter of fact, I did not succeed in getting a pass to , 

but got one to a neighboring town which I flourished before 
the . bewildered eyes of the gendarme in the outskirts of 

and he mistook it for what I ought to have had, and 

let our machine pass in. 

The thing that struck me most about the place was the 
quiet and serenity of it all. The great movements of this 
tumultuous war were being directed from the town, yet it 
seemed almost asleep. It was like a summer resort in Octo- 
ber. Most houses closed — only a few autos in the street, 
only a moderate number of people strolling aimlessly, Sun- 
day-fashion, here and there. In a field near the staff building 



some French soldiers were playing football with a small group 
of spectators about them. The telephone and telegraph wires 
may have been busy and doubtless were, but outwardly the 
town was asleep, and the quiet lawns of the park, green in 
January, and the sunlit vistas through the long allees of the 
forest, I shall not soon forget. Gaby was quite resplendent 
in his fresh sky-blue uniform, and he had many wonderful 
stories to tell of his five months in the trenches. I also saw 
another friend, Andre Tardieu, who once lectured at Harvard 
and who is also on the general's staff. Gaby took some pic- 
tures which one of these days he will send to me. We leave 
early to-morrow for Dunkirk — so I must say good-night. 
This is probably my last night in a cot or bed for a long 
time. 

P.S. The lights all over the city have been extinguished 
to-night. The hospital, which is usually ablaze with light, 
has all curtains drawn and only a few candles and lanterns. 
The Government evidently fears that the Germans, tak- 
ing advantage of the little victory at Soissons, will un- 
dertake some terrifying tactics in the way of an air-raid on 
Paris. 

Monday morning, January 18, 1915. 
We are all astir early to-day. The final touches before de- 
parture must be made, as we leave at nine. Before sundown, 
or at least before two sundowns, we shall be hearing the dis- 
tant boom of the cannon. 



XIII 

Beauvais, January 18, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

At last we are under way! But before we plunge into the 
obscurity that must surround us from now on, one more 

word. 

We (twenty men and twelve automobiles) are spending the 
night in various "billets" in Beauvais, and to-morrow we go 
on north "to the front." 

All day long, wherever we have stopped, people have come 
out of their houses and offered us flowers and fruit and food 
and friendly greetings, very much as our ancestors of a hun- 
dred and fifty years ago must have offered them to the com- 
patriots of Lafayette. 

The French people are appreciative, and no matter how 
humble they are, they know how to express themselves. 

I have a ravenous appetite for food and sleep, and have 
never been happier. 

Good-bye, with love to you both. 



£27] 



XIV 

Dunkirk, January io, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

We have had two days of pleasant driving from Paris to 
the northern coast. Night before last we spent in Beauvais, 
dined comfortably in a small back-street restaurant, and 
then were distributed by the French officers in charge among 
different hotels and private houses. "Brownie" and I were 
billeted in a quaint old hotel, "A l'Ecu," in a room whose 
only windows opened on a noisy courtyard, in which autos 
honked, horses champed, bells rang, dishes clattered, and 
soldiers sang and drank, — but the noise made little difference. 
We slept like logs until we were routed out at half-past five 
by the landlord. Then we stole through the dark streets be- 
fore dawn and attended morning mass in the great cathedral 
just as daylight was beginning to peer through its stained- 
glass windows. 

Our trip has been full of touching and appealing impres- 
sions crowding one upon the other. As our picturesque con- 
voy ran through the little villages, and we stopped here and 
there for some one to clean a spark plug or mend a tire, the 
children invariably crowded around us, and asked ques- 
tions about America, and we often got them to sing the 
" Marseillaise " or some of the topical songs of the moment 
about Guillaume and the " Bodies." (People in France sel- 
dom speak of the Germans as such, they call them simply 
"Bodies," which seems to mean "brutal, stupid people.") 
We lunched at Amiens, but did not have a chance to steal 
away and see the cathedral, as at Beauvais, but pushed di- 
rectly on for the north. There were a good many slight 
breakdowns, as the cars are all new (none occurred to mine 
except a puncture), and we ran on and on, and the evening 



came and we still ran on through one village and town after 
another, passing many convoys of food and ammunition and 
many French, English, Moroccan, Canadian, and Hindu 
troops. Occasionally, when we stopped for some cause or 
other, we had a chance to exchange greetings with them. 

In France to-day there is only one real business — war. 
The towns and villages are cluttered with the paraphernalia 
of war, and one never sees a healthy youth except in uniform. 
Even in Paris the stores seem only to deal in leather and 
rubber and fur clothing for soldiers and in other articles of 
soldiers' equipment. In Paris, as I think I wrote you, women 
and boys are conductors and ticket-sellers in the subways, 
and only women and boys are clerks in the stores. I went 
one day to several shoe stores to buy some heavy boots, 
and there were only young women clerks to try them on 
even for men customers. So it is in the rural districts, one 
sees women and boys and oldish men ploughing and hoeing in 
the fields, and working on the roads. The sturdy men are all 
in uniform and devoting their energies to the business of war. 

After a long, hard drive we reached St. Omer at about 
eleven. The hotels were full, the restaurants were closed, 
and no provision had been made either for our food or our 
lodging. So we wheeled into the public square and slept on 
the stretchers in our ambulances — without other food than 
the chocolate and crackers we had in our pockets. 

We were up again at dawn, and as the water in the spicket 
at the public pump was very cold, I have not washed or 
shaved to-day. We ran on until about noon we arrived at 
Dunkirk — a pretty drive over flat, marshy country dotted 
with thatched and red-tiled roofs, great wooden windmills 
and picturesque church spires. At many of the crossroads 
are little shrines, erected as memorials, I suppose, by devoted 
sons to their departed parents, or by devoted husbands to 
their dead wives. 



Dunkirk is much more of a town than I had imagined, 
with trolley cars and good-sized stores. About ten days ago 
sixteen German aeroplanes flew over it and dropped bombs, 
killing about thirty people. They came and went and came 
again for nearly four hours with four French aeroplanes 
chasing them, and the people who told us about it said that 
every one stood in the street, instead of running to their 
cellars, and watched the spectacle with open-eyed wonder. 

A little while ago a French aeroplane flew over the city 
in the darkness, scouting the sky with its searchlight. 

You can imagine how interesting it all must be. All day 
yesterday, as we ran along past the quiet towns and villages, 
we could hear the great cannons on the front booming like 
distant thunder. Just think of it! For five hundred and 
more miles these cannon are booming day after day all day 
long and often throughout the night. 

To-night we had a very good dinner (French soldiers' 
rations) in the freight shed of the railway station, which has 
been fitted up as a temporary hospital for the wounded and 
sick brought in on the trains. It was a good meal of soup, 
roast beef, potatoes, succotash, jam, coffee and beer, — 
served on a tin plate, which was used for all the courses. 
Around us were the cots of the wounded — with a few 
wounded lying on them. 

To-night we are to sleep in a convent. To-morrow we 
shall be told just what our job is to be. 

Wednesday morning, January 20. 
I am sending this by a friend who is running back to Paris, 
and he can mail it from there. As we are here in the zone of 
the army, correspondence is difficult, and subject to censure. 



XV 

Dunkirk) January 22, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

We are in the war zone now, only a few miles from the 
Belgian frontier and the trenches. Our equipment of thirteen 
autos is divided into two squads, and I am on the night 
shift from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., driving wounded from the trains 
to one or another of the score of hospitals in Dunkirk and 
the neighboring towns, or to the hospital steamers that carry 
them to Boulogne or Brest, or some other port on the west 
coast. During the day we try to sleep and rest in our quar- 
ters, — the schoolroom of a convent, where we have eighteen 
cots side by side. 

It has rained almost incessantly, but to-day the sun came 
out and "Brownie" and I started out toward noon for a 
short stroll through the town to make some purchases. Sud- 
denly a bomb exploded a few blocks away and then another 
and another, like cannon crackers on the Fourth of July, 
and we saw people scurrying into their shops and houses and 
closing down their shutters. The "Taubes" had arrived 
again and were bombarding the town. We ran into an open 
hospital door, and poking our heads out from time to time 
watched the wonderful spectacle. Three or four German 
aeroplanes were encircling the town at a height of perhaps 
four thousand feet, now sailing out over the Channel, and 
then quickly returning, and as they returned we heard re- 
ports of the dropping bombs. In a few moments the French 
guns got into action and one saw their shells bursting in 
white puffs of smoke before and behind the German ma- 
chines, and then we saw the English and French biplanes 
rising in pursuit. It was a fascinating spectacle lasting about 
two hours. About a dozen people in different parts of the 



city were killed and quite a fire was started along the docks 
by the incendiary bombs, and very soon clouds of smoke 
were trailing over the city. 

Of course, no one can know when a bomb has been dropped 
until it strikes, but you can imagine how the people fly into 
their houses as the aeroplanes come near to the zenith, and 
how they peer out to see them when they have passed on. 
One bomb dropped about fifty yards from our ambulances, 
digging a hole nearly two feet deep in the cobblestone pave- 
ment and sending fragments flying for half a block in every 
direction. There are several small holes in the canvas cover 
of my ambulance in consequence. My orderly caught a 
kodak of one explosion before the smoke cleared. This after- 
noon about four, a German aeroplane again appeared high 
in the sky and dropped bombs over the city, and I hear that 
about a dozen people were killed before the machine was 
brought down by the French biplane which pursued it and 
shot balls through its machinery. 

I am writing in the dimly lighted freight shed of the rail- 
way station, which is used as a distributing station for the 
hospitals. Around me are a hundred or more cots for the 
wounded and the sick, about half of them occupied. We are 
waiting for the night trains from the front bringing their 
nightly freight of tragedy. They come, four or five of them, 
every night loaded with wounded and sick, poor fellows in 
every degree of decrepitude. Near me as I write is a Moroc- 
can lying on a cot, and looking very worn and homesick. 
He knows little French and has no comrades with whom he 
can talk. Twice he has turned his dark eyes toward me and 
pushed his hand out from under his cloak and whispered, 
"Touchez la main, touchez la main" (touch my hand). 
A few moments ago a priest administered extreme unction to 
another poor fellow dying of pneumonia and raving so that 
he had to be strapped to his cot. 



War has its picturesque sides, but it is a sad business. 
There are said to be more than six hundred thousand 
wounded to-day in the hospitals of France. All over the 
country, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, schools, 
colleges,' churches, hotels, museums, town halls, and every 
available sort of building have been made over into hospi- 
tals. The doctors tell me that more than seventy thousand 
wounded and sick have passed through Dunkirk alone since 
the war began. There are twelve or fifteen thousand here 



now 



To me the most pathetic are not the wounded, but the 
poor sick fellows of whom we see scores brought in every day, 
unshaven for months, dirty, haggard, and scarcely able to 
move from exhaustion, rheumatism, fever, or frozen feet. 
The worst cases which can't be moved are kept here — the 
rest are reshipped to western France. The wounded and 
sick are divided into two classes — sitters or "hoppers," as 
the English "Tommies" call them, who can sit up and walk, 
and "liers," who have to be carried upon stretchers. Word 
comes to take two "liers," or three "sitters," to this or that 
hospital, and one loads them on his machine almost like 
merchandise, almost forgetting that they are somebody's 
brothers and sons, or husbands, who a year ago were liv- 
ing peaceful civilian lives like ourselves, without any more 
thought of war than we had. 

There are about a dozen German prisoners in a box car 
in the station, who are a source of considerable amusement 
to the old reservists stationed here as sentinels. Every morn- 
ing they are brought out to sweep the station and carry 
water; and sometimes they help to carry our gasoline tanks. 
After an hour or so in the open they are locked up again. 
This morning the old countryman who was guarding them, 
after carefully locking the door of the car, and being in 
perfect safety, shook his clenched fist at the door and shouted, 



"sales cochons," quite unconscious of the amusement he was 
giving to the bystanders. I sometimes talk with them, but 
avoid doing so unless I translate what I say, lest some one 
should suspect me of being a German spy or of communicat- 
ing things to them that I ought not. 

Here in this forlorn station, I discovered the other night 
Comtesse Benoist d'Azy, whom I used to know well in 
Washington when she was in the French Embassy. I knew 
her only as a companion at balls and dinners, but war brings 
out unexpected qualities in people, and I find her here living 
a remarkably hard and squalid life, the only woman in the 
railway hospital night after night, helping to dress the 
wounds of the poor fellows who are brought in on the night 
trains. She has introduced me to Colonel Morier, who is in 
charge here, and through him we hope some time to be sent 
somewhat nearer to the lines. 



XVI 

January 28. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Last night we had another visit from the Bodies. It was 
a wonderful clear moonlit night, and as I drove about the 
deserted, moon-blanched streets carrying mutilated human 
freight, I was thinking how the same moon was drenching 
the silent harbor of Gloucester, when suddenly, without the 
slightest warning, we heard a Boom ! down the street. A 
bomb had dropped from the clear, silent sky. Boom ! Boom ! 
Boom! They were dropping here and there, and blinds and 
shutters were quickly pulled together. I stopped my motor 
and got out and could hear the motors in the sky, but 
nothing was visible. Boom! Boom! Boom! like thunder. It 
was rather terrifying, but there was nothing to do, any more 
than there is in a thunder storm, so I resumed my trip and 
returned to the station. All the lights had been extinguished, 
and when I entered the freight shed which we used as a 
hospital, and struck a match, the scene really was amusing. 
The old reservists, who serve as infirmiers and stretcher- 
bearers, were hiding in corners under the mattresses which 
they had torn from the beds. An old soldier whom I rec- 
ognized as a sentinel had crawled under a table. In one 
corner I found Madame Benoist d'Azy surrounded by some 
of my American friends, and as the bombardment had 
ceased we came out and searched in the pits where the bombs 
had fallen, looking for pieces of the bombs. No one had been 
hurt, but many were scared out of their wits. 

Apparently the Germans are trying to destroy the rail- 
way station, which is interesting for us, as we are stationed 
there. 



There were no more shipments of wounded to the city's 
hospitals through the night, and I slept as best I could on 
the seat of my auto, but before retiring I took pains to 
find a cellar to which to resort when, if ever, the Bodies 
returned. 



XVII 

Dunkirk, January 29, 191 5. 3 a.m. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

So long as I live, whether it be weeks or months or years, 
I can never forget this night. The sky was clear, the moon 
at its full, a gorgeous, wonderful, silent night. We were 
waiting in the station about 9 p.m. The nightly train of 
Belgian wounded had just come in, and the sick and wounded 
men were hobbling into the freight-house hospital, or were 
being carried in on stretchers. I was talking to a pleasant 
Belgian doctor who had descended from the train, and tell- 
ing him about last night's air-raid, and explaining that on 
that account the station and the freight-house hospital were 
to-night left uniighted — when without warning a bomb ex- 
ploded about a block away and sent many running and 
shouting in great excitement. Bang! went another bomb, 
not far away, and Boom ! a third, and Boom ! a fourth, and 
Boom ! a fifth, and so on. We could hear the whir of the 
motors in the sky, but only once could I see one of the aero- 
planes as it crossed the face of the moon high in the air. 
The bombardment must have lasted at intervals for the 
greater part of an hour, and meanwhile the "soixante- 
quinzes" were getting in their work, and one heard the 
detonations of their shells as well as saw their puffs of smoke 
as they exploded in the sky, and now and then one heard 
their shrapnel rattling as it rained on the ground. 

The spectacle was absorbing beyond anything I have ever 
seen. I suppose it was fraught with danger, but one almost 
forgot one's self in wondering where the next bomb would 
drop. When the bombardment was over, we started out 
with our ambulances to see what havoc had been wrought. 
On the third floor of a house near the station, a bomb had 

[37] 



pierced the roof and a poor old woman lay torn in pieces. 
She was evidently getting ready for bed when the bomb 
struck. It was not a pleasant sight. On another street we 
found the body of a customs officer and two badly maimed 
fellow officials lying in pools of blood on the sidewalk. They 
had been innocently walking in the quiet night. I picked up 
the dead body, still warm and pliant, and with difficulty got 
it into the machine. The arms insisted on falling down every 
time that I crossed them over the poor fellow's breast. Then, 
for the first time in my life, I drove a hearse, as we carried 
the lifeless body to one of the hospitals. Later, we went down 
on the dock and found three other fellows badly torn and 
wounded and took them to one of the hospitals. 

On two streets I saw whole fronts of houses torn to pieces ; 
and in several places hideous streaks of blood dripped down 
the sidewalks to the gutter. It was about two o'clock when 
we got our last wounded man to a hospital, and as the hos- 
pital door closed and I looked up the silent street with its 
moonlight and shadows, the bells in the old city tower tin- 
kled out their carillon. It seemed like the peaceful end of a 
tumultuous tragic symphony. 

And so the night has passed, and now I sit in my ambu- 
lance writing by the light of my lantern, and outside the 
moon is drenching the world with its silent whiteness, just as 
if all were at peace, and there were not hundreds of thousands 
of wounded soldiers groaning and suffering, all over Europe. 

I scarcely know what to say as to the justification for this 
kind of warfare. War is war and not child's play. That I 
realize. But at the same time, I doubt whether the French 
or the English would bombard an uninvested city without 
warning. No military advantage can be gained by dropping 
bombs indiscriminately over a sleeping city, and certainly 
the world at large and the judgment of the future will not 
endorse the wanton slaughter of civilians and women. 



XVIII 

Dunkirk, January 30, igi 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I can truthfully say that I have never been more inter- 
ested in life, and that I am utterly well, though living on 
army rations, supplemented by only a few additions in the 
way of chocolate, prunes, and figs, and although I have been 
on duty every night for a week from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., and 
have scarcely seen the sun during all that time. 

I have sent a letter to Harry Sleeper, asking him to have 
copies of some of my letters made and sent to Y and 
C. B. and C. S. S., etc., because I thought it would be easier 
for him to look after making the copies than for you. I have 
little chance to write and still less to duplicate what I write, 
and this plan seemed to me to promise the largest results, 
assuming that, if my letters get through, they may be of 
interest to some of my friends. 

Don't ever worry about me; I am sensible and will avoid 
risks. 

If you don't hear, it is because the censor is holding up 
my mail. 

With love, as ever. 



C39] 



XIX 

February I, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I am on the day squad this week and day after day it is 
the same story. Five to eight trains arrive sometime during 
every twenty-four hours, and out of these trains hobble or 
are carried the grist of the war in our vicinity, from four to 
six hundred men daily, — men with their eyes or heads or 
chins heavily bandaged, men with their arms or legs in 
slings, men shot through the shoulder or hips or stomach, 
men with frozen feet, men weakened by typhoid or pneu- 
monia, men broken down and scarcely able to stand from 
months of exposure and anxiety in the trenches, men pale 
or yellow with sickness and unshaven for weeks. The French 
soldiers wear the long blue coats and red trousers made 
familiar to us in the pictures by Detaille and de Neuville of 
the soldiers of 1870, and with their untrimmed beards they 
seem very like the pictures of the soldiers of our own Civil 
War. Among those who descend from the train there are 
many picturesque Arabs, with heavy turbans, and volumi- 
nous Oriental cloaks, and sometimes there are wounded 
German soldiers. 

They all make their forlorn way to the freight houses which 
form a temporary hospital, and there they are looked over 
by the staff of doctors, their wounds are dressed or redressed, 
and they find places on the long rows of dirty cots awaiting 
their final disposal. Many are sent on by other trains to 
other parts of France, and the rest, the worst cases, are 
given to us to carry to the various hospitals temporarily 
established in the different schools and public buildings of 
Dunkirk or in some of the neighboring towns within a radius 
of ten miles. 

C4°n 



It is hard to realize the human cost of war. This centre 
represents only one small corner of the fighting line of France, 
yet here there come, every day, several hundred who have 
been mutilated or injured or invalided by the war in our 
little immediate neighborhood. The cost of the war as a whole 
is simply appalling, yet it must go on, and the people of 
France are determined that it shall go on until those who 
were responsible for it are crushed. 

I have talked with quite a number of the German wounded. 
Several are brought in every day, and they are looked after 
by the French doctors and nurses as carefully as are those 
who were wounded in the service of France. Usually a group 
of French soldiers gather around the cot of a German 
wounded, eyeing him curiously, but not unsympathetically, 
as if he were a strange animal, only half human like the 
"missing link." It is sometimes hard for them to realize 
that a Boche, emanating from a country that has brought 
so much misery into the world, is really a civilized human 
being after all, but they have a great sense of chivalry and 
many, many times I have heard them say, " Because the 
Boches are barbarous and inhuman, is no reason why we 
should be so. We will show them what it is to be civilized !" 
And they ask whether they would like beer or coffee and they 
get them bread and meat and give them chocolate and cigar- 
ettes. I often act as interpreter and translate questions and 
answers between the French and German wounded. Once 
or twice I have brought together in this way men who two 
days before were trying to kill each other, and they have 
complimented each other on their courage and have shaken 
hands. A German with a heavily bandaged leg said to me 
the other day, "Tell him that it was his 'soixante-quinze' 
[the 75-centimetre gun of which the French are so proud] 
that cut off my leg." The Frenchman replied, " Tell him 
that it was a German 77-centimetre that cut off my arm." 

C40 



And so it goes. There are about fifty German prisoners here 
now, kept in a box car and brought out every day to sweep 
up the station and clean the yard. I am sure they are glad 
to be let out in the open air and have something to do. I 
gave one of them a pair of gloves the other day, and he was 
very grateful. He always nods to me now and says, "Guten 
Tag," as I pass. 

At times one forgets the agony and horrors of the war 
and is impressed by the picturesqueness and beauty of it. 
Every man one sees is in uniform, and the farmers and store 
clerks and bookkeepers, who ordinarily would be uninter- 
esting to look at, have become picturesque and their lives 
have become touched with a glamour of romance that peace- 
ful civilian pursuits never would have made possible. As 
they are grouped in the dimly lighted freight-house hospital, 
or on the streets, they are always making unforgettable 
pictures that any draughtsman or painter would like to 
register and make permanent for others. Lives, too, that 
have hitherto been spent in commonplace labor for them- 
selves are now devoted to the service of others, and are 
given recklessly and without reserve to their country, and 
many of these lives have been sanctified by acts of heroism 
and glory worthy to be immortalized by the greatest artists 
and poets. 

One of the trips that I like to make is to a beautifully 
appointed sanitarium (now a military hospital with twenty- 
five hundred beds) on the shore about eight miles from here 
— Zuydcote. Perhaps you can find it on the map. It is 
almost on the Belgian frontier, and the road to it is the 
highway to Furnes and Nieuport, where heavy fighting is 
going on all the time. I take wounded and sick soldiers out 
there every day, sometimes several times a day, and on the 
way we pass a continual military procession, dozens of 
transformed motor omnibuses and motor trucks loaded with 



supplies, artillery companies, and companies of infantry 
singing gayly as they march out toward the firing line, or 
dragging their tired feet along as they march back. Every 
now and then a limousine goes snorting by like a whirlwind 
carrying officers to or from the front, or a motor cycle carry- 
ing messages; most picturesque of all are the companies of 
mounted Arabs in their gay paraphernalia trotting along 
as in a circus parade. 

My days of work begin at 7.30 a.m. and end at 7 p.m., and 
this leaves little time or strength to write — and now at 
eight o'clock the lights are turned out in Dunkirk and we 
can do nothing but go to bed. This has been the order since 
the Germans began their nightly aeroplane attacks. Both 
indoors and out all lights have to be extinguished at 8 p.m., 
and since the order went into effect, no bombs have dropped 
from the sky. The aeronauts, I suppose, cannot know when 
they are passing over a city which is as black in the night 
as the plain country itself. 

Dunkirk often makes me think of Gloucester. It is some- 
what larger and, of course, much older. It has much more 
shipping of merchandise and many more substantial build- 
ings of brick and stone and greater docking facilities. But 
it is on the sea, it is a fishing town, and a summer resort. 
Never before probably has it been so alive in winter time as 
now with the thousands of soldiers who go and come here. 
The harbor is like that of Gloucester, a forest of masts, and 
there is a beautiful old church devoted to the patron saint, 
"Notre Dame des Dunes," the name referring to the sand 
dunes which surround the town. On the altar of the church 
is a figure of the Virgin surrounded by shells and insignia of 
the sea. The walls of the church are covered with pictures 
of boats and from the ceiling hang literally dozens of old 
boat models. 



XX 

Dunkirk, February 2, 1915. 8.30 p.m. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

It has been a long hard day, and I am ready for bed. I am 
writing in the little auberge called the "Ancien Hermit- 
age" which we call our "chow house" and where we and a 
number of French soldiers eat our army rations, — soup, tough 
horse meat called roast beef, potatoes, beans, and cheese. 
We have finished for the evening and have sung French and 
American songs and wound up with the "Marseillaise" and 
a last drink together, as some of our French comrades are 
leaving in the morning for the trenches. Each of us has a 
tin plate, a tin cup, and a knife, fork, and spoon from our 
mess-kit, and with these we eat our three meals a day sitting 
about the rough tables of the little tap-room — rough food 
and rough living quite in keeping with soldier life. We sleep, 
eighteen of us, on cots in a schoolroom around the corner, 
which we call our "billet," and we are supposed to be in by 
8 p.m., as all of the city's lights are turned out then. The 
street lights are put out at eight, and after that shutters 
must be drawn down, and not a trace of light must be visible 
from outside, and after nine no one is allowed to circulate 
on the streets. These precautions are taken to impede noc- 
turnal aeroplane bombardments, such as terrified Dunkirk 
last week, and which resulted in several deaths. So far they 
have been successful. 

My work began to-day with the taking of a poor insane 
soldier to one of the hospitals. He waved his arms and 
shouted all the way and it was distressing. The work ended 
by carrying a soldier who had just tried to commit suicide 
by shooting a revolver in his mouth. A little while later I 
saw another poor fellow die in the railway station hospital 

[44] 



without friends or comrades near, and I watched the soldiers 
divide his tobacco and the contents of his knapsack. These 
were only a few of the episodes of a not unusual day. On 
one of my trips to the big hospital in Zuydcote to-day I saw 
a heap of at least twenty coffins in the hospital yard, and 
one of the nurses told me that on the average about twenty 
of the inmates die there each day and that every morning 
there is a joint funeral for them. How little do people in 
America realize the sadness and enormity of this war! 

I made several long trips to-day to hospitals in neighbor- 
ing towns, which I always enjoy. All along the way we pass 
rows of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements, awaiting 
possible use in case a retreat should ever be necessary. It 
is pleasant, too, to catch glimpses of the sea and of the sand 
dunes (like those of Coffin's Beach), with little red-tiled cot- 
tages nestling in their hollows. And all along the way we 
pass little Flemish inns with curiously appealing names, " Au 
repos des travailleurs," "A la belle vue de la passerelle," 
just opposite a footbridge over one of the canals; "Au joyeux 
retour des pecheurs," in a little fishing village; "Au repos 
des promeneurs"; "A la relache des bains," near a bathing 
establishment, etc., — all so suggestive of the peaceful life 
that is no more. 

One cannot go in or out of the town without having a 
password, which changes every morning or night. Once in a 
while I forget the word, or forget to ask for it before leaving 
the hospital, and there is great difficulty with the sentinels. 

This is a rambling note with impressions jotted down as 
they came to mind. I write to-night, though very tired, 
because the comrade who brought up our letters is returning 
to-morrow and can take this back through the lines to Paris. 
We are, as I think I have written you, within the war zone 
and a letter mailed here would probably have to be read by 
the censor. 

[45] 



February 3, 1915. 3 p.m. 
In the station hospital, they are building this afternoon a 
bomb-proof compartment to which the wounded and sick 
can be carried in case of another bombardment. A low shed 
about two hundred feet long has been constructed and 
covered with hundreds of bags of sand. 



XXI 

Neuilly-sur-Seine, March 2, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I think that all your letters up to the 16th of February 
must have reached me, and when I get down to Morgan- 
Harjes this morning there will probably be letters of later 
dates waiting there. After my first week or two in Dunkirk, 
I wrote to Morgan-Harjes to forward my mail to their agent 
there, and letters and papers came through promptly — 
very promptly considering that it is war-time. 

There is a lot of pluck among these French people. I sup- 
pose you have read of Madame Bernhardt, who joined the 
great army of the mutilated a couple of weeks ago when her 
leg was amputated, and who now announces that she will 
play "L'Aiglon" and "Phedre" again in Paris during the 
summer. That is the pluck of the French soldier, and what 
pluck they have! It is very seldom that a French soldier 
allows a groan to escape him. I often see wounded fellows 
whose faces are contorted with pain, but not a sound escapes 
them, and if you greet them with a sympathetic word, in- 
variably, even when the agony is intense, there is a respond- 
ing smile. I have seen, too, many poor fellows mutilated for 
life, but who were cheerful and gay and seemed proud and 
almost glad to have been able to give so much for their 
country. 

I came down from Dunkirk in a motor, spending Saturday 
night in Amiens and arriving here on Sunday afternoon. 
After six weeks in an unchanging scene, I enjoyed the sight 
of new roads and towns. It was interesting to see how well 
tilled the fields are everywhere for the coming crops. The 
ground does not often freeze here in northern France; the 
farmers can work all winter, and the boys and the womenfolk 

[47] 



and the older men have been hard at it everywhere, as the 
carefully ploughed fields well show. There was scarcely a 
field that we passed where we did not see women and chil- 
dren hoeing or ploughing. So France will have her usual sup- 
ply of grain and vegetables when the harvest comes, except 
in those nine departments which the Germans still occupy, 
and which are destined to be ploughed by the armies and 
fertilized by much human blood before the harvest comes. 
The French people have shown great patience with the 
long pause of the winter campaign. They have endured it 
without complaint or criticism from any quarter, and with 
a fine confidence that Joffre can be depended upon, when 
the right time comes, to resume operations. They did not 
want the war. They did not expect it. They were not pre- 
pared for it. It was thrust upon them without warning and 
without reason, but they are determined now that it shall 
continue to such a point that never again, during the life- 
time of those now living at least, can it be resumed. The 
other night, when we were coming down from Dunkirk, 
something happened to the auto as we were passing through 
a small village, and seeing a welcoming light and a kitchen 
fire through a window, I went in to get warm. A little mother 
and her four children were sitting by the kitchen stove, the 
children leaning on a table and cutting out soldiers from the 
papers, as Helen and Polly so often do. The father was off 
at the war and so were two uncles — brothers of the little 
mother. She asked, as they all ask, "How long is it going 
to last?" And when I ventured to guess that it might per- 
haps end next winter, she said, "All I ask is to see my hus- 
band come back sometime safe and sound, but I want the 
war to go on until the Kaiser is beaten, even if it takes 
years, so that my little boys will never have to serve in 
another war." And that is how French people of all classes 
seem to feel. The war must go on, at no matter what frightful 

[48] 



cost until "Guillaume" and the Hohenzollerns and German 
militarism are extinguished. 

In Dunkirk I saw and talked with many German wounded. 
As I was about the only one in the station hospital who 
could speak German, the French doctors sometimes asked 
me to interpret between them and the Germans, and I al- 
ways enjoyed doing it, telling the Germans that I was an 
American and assuring them that they would be looked after 
in the French hospitals with the same care as the French 
wounded, which is utterly true, although sometimes the 
Germans seemed to fear this would not be the case. I have 
never seen any harshness displayed toward German wounded 
or even toward German prisoners who were not wounded. 
There was always a good deal of curiosity to see the wounded 
Bodies, and to find out their point of view. The French 
soldiers would gather around the cots in the station where 
they lay, and get them coffee or chocolate or beer, and bread 
and meat, and then I would intermediate the questions and 
answers. When was he wounded and how ? — and perhaps 
some French wounded on a neighboring cot would call out, 
"I was wounded on the same field yesterday," and some- 
times I have seen them laugh and shake hands. The French 
soldiers are not bitter toward the German private — they 
know that he is not to blame. "We have not anything 
against you, except that you have a government of the 
Middle Ages. So we had, too, until 1870. And you have 
got to do to-day what we did then. You have got to get 
rid of your emperor who thrives on war, just as we did. 
And when you have a republic and govern yourselves there 
won't be any more war." The more ignorant Germans 
seem bewildered by the thought of living without a Kaiser, 
but several times I have seen more intelligent Germans 
shrug their shoulders and say, "Perhaps, who knows?" 

Of course, I agree to all this and am a willing interpreter. 



I tell the Germans how well I know their country, and of 
the pleasant memories I have of summers I have spent 
there ; that I have had friends among German people, but 
that I too believe that the world must be purged of the 
scourge which their government is. And I always add: 
"You sing of Deutsche Traue [German faithfulness], but 
never again until your government is changed and the whole 
Hohenzollern machine is sent to the scrap heap, and the 
German people learn to rule themselves, can the other 
peoples of the world believe in or accept the German word 
as good. Your government has broken its pledged word and 
called its promises scraps of paper. In violation of these, it 
has invaded and ruined an innocent country and would have 
starved seven million innocent people if Americans had not 
prevented them from starving. The war must and will go 
on until your government is overturned, until you wake up 
to the fact that your government has betrayed you, until 
you have established a new government such as other civil- 
ized people have, in which no individual or family can pre- 
tend to rule by divine right, and not until then, not until 
the German people rule themselves, will Deutsche Traue 
have any but an ironical meaning to the rest of the world." 

Some day, and perhaps the day is not so distant as now it 
seems, the German people will awake from their hypnotic 
dreams and will realize that if their name " German" is ever 
again to be associated with honor and chivalry and to be 
other than an offence to the nostrils of the world, their gov- 
ernment must expiate its heinous crimes. 

On the way down from Dunkirk the other day, we came 
through much of the region traversed by the German army 
on their triumphal march which preceded the battle of the 
Marne last September. I am sending you some postals from 
the little town of Senlis, through which we passed and 
which still lies in ruins. Some civilian, the Germans claimed, 

ls°3 



fired a shot, so the German officer ordered that all the public 
buildings and the finest houses should be destroyed. 

I have marked a rather poor picture of one of these houses 
which must have been a beautiful place, and which we 
visited, and with whose caretaker I had quite a talk. It was 
surrounded by gardens, and carefully trimmed lawns, and 
statuary and gravelled paths, and the house contained tapes- 
tries, paintings, and many objets d'art which the owners had 
been collecting for a lifetime. The gardener's wife showed us 
about the ruins, and told us how the mistress of the house 
used to polish her tiled floors on her hands and knees, so 
devoted was she to the place. The owner of the house, a 
man named Fenwick, a captain in the French army, was 
off at the war, and the wife departed a day or two before 
the Germans arrived, leaving the caretaker and his wife in 
the lodge at the gate. The story of what happened is typical 
of many other stories I have heard, and in this case I heard 
it directly from an eye-witness. The German officers sent 
two motor vans to the house and looted it from top to 
bottom of tapestries, paintings, clocks, furniture, wine, and 
everything else that appealed to them, and then they 
ordered fires built in various parts of it and blew it up. 
Nothing remains now but the shell of the house; not a door, 
or a chair, or a window frame. Practically every house on 
the street was treated the same way, and the mayor of the 
town was taken out to a neighboring hill and shot. 

There can be no question about it. This sort of thing 
happened all along the line of the then apparently victorious 
army. When officers occupied country places and chateaux, 
they appropriated whatever appealed to them. Doubtless 
there are many German officers who would have disapproved 
of such performances, but the German officers as a class 
have been so long accustomed to trample upon civilian 
rights, even in their own country, that it was only to be 



expected that they would disregard such rights to a far 
greater degree in a foreign country. I feel confident, on the 
other hand, that the natural chivalry of French officers sim- 
ilarly situated would have made such conduct impossible. 

So much in general. 

As for myself, the ambulance committee have promoted 
me and I am now a staff officer, with the title of general 
inspector of the field service. An automobile has been put 
at my disposal, and I am hereafter to visit and inspect the 
work of our various sections in the different divisions of the 
French army. It is the most interesting job I can imagine, 
and will be a welcome change. I shall be almost continuously 
on the road, here, there, and everywhere. It is a new place 
just created, and I am to make of it what I can. 



XXII 

St. Omer, France, March q, 191 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I left Paris at ten o'clock this morning on my first inspec- 
tion tour, equipped with formidable letters to French officials 
in the different armies along the line and prepared to look 
into various questions of concern to the administration of 
our several sections — with power to act if need be. 

A high-powered Peugeot car has been assigned to me, 
with a pleasant fellow named Freeborn as driver. We in- 
tended to stop first of all at Beauvais, where we have a 
section of thirteen machines and where the French adminis- 
tration for the automobile service in the western armies is 
centred. Then we intended to stop leisurely at St. Pol, 
Abbeville, and elsewhere, and end up at Dunkirk, at each of 
which places we have a few cars. But about ten miles out 
of Paris we had an experience which changed our plans. 
A heavy limousine ahead of us skidded into the curbing and 
smashed its steering-gear, and out of the depths of the car 
emerged two English officers, one of them a general. They 
were bound from Paris to St. Omer, the headquarters of the 
English lines, and they were anxious to go on without delay; 
so we took them in, changed our plans and brought them 
through the 250 or 260 kilometres to their destination. 

The general was General Henderson, of the Flying Corps, 
an altogether delightful person, who lunched with us as 
our guest in Beauvais and insisted upon our having tea and 
remaining to dinner with him at his headquarters in an old 
chateau near St. Omer. So we have added to our stock of 
war memories the recollection of a hospitable evening spent 
in France with half a dozen English officers about their table, 
with much good talk. 

C533 



It was surprising to find how familiar they all were with 
our Civil War. They have all studied at Aldershot the cam- 
paigns of the war, especially the campaigns of Stonewall 
Jackson so wonderfully depicted in Henderson's "Life." 
General Henderson, who I believe is a distant relative of the 
author of that work, said that, although he had never seen 
the region, he thought he could find his way blindfolded over 
the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland. They all admired 
Lee, and Henderson said that he placed him among the 
"Great Six," or whatever the number, — the few great 
generals of all time. 

They seemed to think that the war will last for at least a 
year. They have genuine respect for the strategy of Joffre 
and entertain no doubts whatever as to his ability or as to 
the eventual outcome. 

As I retire to-night I can hear the cannon rumbling on 
the frontier. 

Good-night. 



XXIII 

Dunkirk, March u, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

It seemed almost like getting home again to come within 
sight of the spires and towers of Dunkirk and to pass again 
along the roads of the suburbs that I have driven over so 
many times night and day in my ambulance. It was good, 
too, to see the fellows with whom I had messed so long. I 
slept in my old cot in the schoolroom, heard the old jokes 
before going to sleep and before arising, and the whole ex- 
perience was like going back to college after graduating. 

The Comtesse Benoist d'Azy was still working in the sta- 
tion hospital and has befriended the boys in many ways. 
I had several talks with her, and also saw Colonel Morier, 
the acting general, who was good enough to ask me to lunch 
with him and his fellow officers at their headquarters. He 
is a charming man, with the graceful courtesy which only 
Frenchmen have, and at the same time an efficient officer 
who carries out his plans with unhesitating despatch. 
Through him I am trying and hope some day soon to get a 
more interesting position for our fellows now in Dunkirk. 
He knows, by the way, the former Italian Ambassador to 
the United States, Marquis Cusani, who used to be at 
Gloucester, and of whom Miss Beaux made a drawing last 
summer. 

On the way from St. Omer to Dunkirk I passed through 
the picturesque town of Cassel, on the top of an isolated 
hill, from which one can see over the surrounding fertile 
country for about fifteen miles in every direction. There is 
located the headquarters of General Foch, and at those 
headquarters is my old friend, Rene Puaux, now on the 
general's staff. I spent an hour or so with him wandering 

tssl 



around the town, renewing old memories and talking about 
the war. He is in charge of espionage and told interesting 
stories of his interviews with German prisoners. 

They had recently discovered from examining German 
prisoners the location of a German general's headquarters 
in an old chateau several miles back of the line, and doubt- 
less believed by the Germans to be quite safe. After Rene's 
discovery the French brought up a number of long-range 
guns and, accurately gauging the range, without any warn- 
ing, the day before our visit, the French guns had let go a 
perfect hail of shells and reduced the German headquarters 
to a ruin. Imagine the German officers scurrying out like 
ants, leaving papers, records, and everything. 

Rene told also of a visit recently made to Cassel by a 
feminine American journalist, Mary Roberts Rinehart. She 
knew scarcely a word of French, and Rene went about as her 
interpreter, had several guns fired for her benefit, and, at 
the end of a long day, sat down with her and helped her 
write her article. General Joffre, who disbelieves in publicity, 
when he heard of it, sent a reprimand for showing Mrs. 
Rinehart such attention. If you see the article in any 
American magazine, send me a copy. 

Good-bye again. We are off now for Paris-Plage, where 
our next section is located. 

Paris, March 18, 1915. 

The preceding sheets of this letter I found among my 
papers a few minutes ago. I had intended to add to them 
every day — but other things intervened. I can only tell you 
very briefly some of the impressions of the remaining days 
of my first inspection tour. 

We left Dunkirk on a cold, gray afternoon, Thursday, 
March 11, passing through Calais, which is nominally in the 
Belgian line, forming a part of the narrow strip that reaches 



from the little northwest corner of Belgium which still re- 
mains in Belgian hands, back to the coast and Calais. (To 
the north is the French army, with which we were stationed 
in Dunkirk. To the south, the narrow strip of the English 
lines, and then come the French lines again all the way to 
Switzerland.) 

On we went through Calais, skirting the bleak coast to 
Boulogne. Then on again to Etaples and Paris-Plage, which 
we reached about dusk. Paris-Plage is a fashionable coast 
watering-place, whose splendid hotels and casino are now 
all turned into hospitals. Here we found a group of ambu- 
lances, and we got a warm welcome from our boys. It was 
the day of the great English battle of Neuve-Chapelle, and 
trainloads of English wounded were pouring in from the 
east. In fact, our boys were up all night with their ambu- 
lances. 

Next day we motored over sunny hills and farms and 
through the picturesque villages of Picardy, much of the 
time not seeing a trace of war, only the doux pays de 
France, touched by the first breath of spring. At Hesdin, 
St. Pol, and St. Riquier we have ambulances, and in all of 
those towns were many soldiers. 

We spent the night at St. Riquier, a dear little village 
with a wonderful cathedral whose facade, hundreds and 
hundreds of years old, is sculptured like the finest lace — in 
some respects the most beautiful old church I have ever 
seen. I shall not soon forget the scene next morning within 
the church, when with an old French colonel I stood in the 
choir loft of the church and looked down upon a soldier's 
funeral. They do those things with such impeccable taste 
in France. The bright uniforms of the soldiers following the 
flag-draped coffin, the mellow tones of the century-old 
organ, the soldier barytone singing with deep emotion beside 
me, the fragrance of the incense, the thought of the boy who 

lS7l 



had died far from his family and friends, the sudden recog- 
nition of the terrible sacrifice that is being made in France 
to save her from a brutal invasion, all united in a poignant 
impression. 

We got back to Paris late Saturday night, the 14th, hav- 
ing covered in a few days about nine hundred kilometres, 
or about five hundred and fifty miles. This week I have 
been struggling with all sorts of administrative problems in 
Neuilly, and have done very little else. 



XXIV 

Paris, March 18, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Scene follows scene and act follows act so rapidly in the 
great world-drama that there is scarcely a day or an hour 
without an experience that I should like to put into words to 
convey to you, and to myself in future years when my mem- 
ory will not be so vivid, but, alas! I have so little free time. 
To-day I motored out to Juilly, about twenty miles from 
Paris, where we also have a hospital in a picturesque old 
quadrangled college which Mrs. H. P. Whitney refitted and 
equipped. I went with Dr. Du Bouchet and Dr. Gros of 
our own hospital, and after lunching with our Juilly friends, 
and talking with our boys who drive the ambulances there, 
we drove on over the battlefield of the Marne. It was there, 
you remember, that last September the French army finally 
halted the onrushing German hordes, saved Paris, and turned 
the invaders back. 

Nothing that I have seen during my three months here 

has so much touched me as the view of those fields. The 

farms have all been carefully ploughed over, and are ready 

for the new year's crops, as they are everywhere in France. 

The women and children and old men have attended to that. 

But every few rods, scattered about the fields, small wooden 

crosses and little red, white and blue flags mark the spots 

where lie the bodies of the boys and men who gave their lives 

in those terrible days. We stopped several times, and got out 

of the motor, and uncovered our heads before graves where 

twenty, or thirty, or forty men had been buried together, 

and which farmers and passers-by had covered with wreaths 

and flowers. On the top of many graves were placed some 

of the clothes and belongings of those who were buried, — 

[593 



here a hat, or a torn coat, or a pair of shoes, there a comb 
or brush, or sponge, or wallet, which might by some chance 
catch the eye of some wife or mother and help her to iden- 
tify the whereabouts of a lost husband or son. All was silent 
in the afternoon sun, but the torn trees, the villages with 
roofless houses, and walls pitted with bullet-holes, and 
church towers torn by shells, told of the thunder and havoc 
of five months ago. 

We drove up to one farmhouse on the top of a gentle hill, 
where General von Kluck made his headquarters for four 
days in that terrible week, and we went through the house 
with the farmer's wife, and heard her tell her story. It was 
one of those nice old places with the farm-buildings built 
around a quadrangle, and with the gardens and buildings 
surrounded by stuccoed walls, but the walls and barns and 
house were badly rent by the German and French shells, and 
the house, deserted at the advent of the Germans, had been, 
as usual, pillaged of whatever was of value. On the wall of 
the entrance hall was scratched in chalk this inscription, as 
well as I can remember it: — 

"Wenn Ihr nicht so rasch weggelaufen hattet, 
hatten wir nicht so viel gesauft." 

"If you had not run away so fast, 
we should not have gotten so 
soused" (drank so much). 

It was the same story that one hears everywhere, of 
coarse brutality on the part of the German officers. I do 
not regard the German people as a brutal race ; I know them 
pretty well after all of the summers I have spent among 
them; but the Prussian officers are often without respect 
for anybody's rights, or for anything except their own med- 
iaeval, miscalled sense of honor. If anybody interferes with 
them, or gets in their way, he must pay the penalty. They 
have overridden their own people for years. The average 

C6o] 



German, in the face of a German officer, cringes and does 
not dare to call his soul his own, and so the Prussian officers, 
from the Kaiser and Crown Prince down, have conducted 
this war. They have behaved without respect for God or 
man. The officers have pillaged houses, stolen tapestries, 
clocks, and furniture, committed deliberate depredations, 
even thrown billiard tables from windows ! torn up dresses in 
closets, and have behaved generally like ruffians. The cha- 
teau of Madame de Bay, in which the Crown Prince was 
quartered, showed this sort of treatment. If the German 
people or the German-Americans want ever to recover the 
respect of the world for their race, they must repudiate the 
officers and officials who have conducted this war and have 
made the name German synonymous with grossness. The 
war, terrible as it is, must go on until the German people 
realize how they have been betrayed, and repudiate those 
who are responsible for the most monstrous crimes that the 
world has ever known. The Kaiser's government has violated 
treaties and broken its pledged word, has wantonly burned 
libraries and destroyed churches, has deliberately pillaged 
and burned houses, has bombarded unfortified towns, has 
violated every principle of law and decency on land and sea, 
and the Kaiser's government has got to go ; it must go, and 
will go, and until it goes, the German people, in the eyes of 
the world, are disgraced. 

I have heard people express the hope that the Kaiser 
may suffer some horrible death as punishment for the un- 
speakable suffering he has brought on the world ; but it is 
better that he may live in full possession of his faculties as 
long as any human being can. He is bound to see his country 
defeated, and to pay the most staggering indemnity in lives 
and money that any country has ever paid. That is as cer- 
tain as the rising of the sun, if he lives. He is also bound 
to see his dynasty pass and his family deposed. That also 

on 



is moderately sure. And then I want to see him live on 
for scores of years, confronted by the consequences of his 
overweening ambition. 

It is impossible to imagine the suffering entailed by this 
war. In France alone, during the past few months of the 
war, up to December 31, the killed numbered over two 
hundred and fifty thousand. In Germany they are said to 
number over a million. And then there is England and 
Austria and Russia and Serbia and Turkey and Japan. 
It is believed that there are over six hundred thousand 
wounded soldiers in the hospitals of France alone at the 
present time. It is all simply overwhelming. Mutilation and 
death cease to mean anything. In Dunkirk, by the time I 
left, after seeing thousands and thousands of mutilated and 
broken human beings, I ceased almost to realize that they 
were human. They just dropped into two classes, the 
"liers" and "sitters," and if they groaned with pain, one 
almost felt annoyed rather than sympathetic. 

Once or twice to-day we got out of the machines and 
wandered into the trenches, which, like mole-holes, run 
everywhere. They are wonderfully well constructed, with 
walls and floors of saplings, and roofed-in bomb-proof com- 
partments at intervals. There are many parallel lines of 
them, running all of the way from the Channel to the Swiss 
frontier, and girdling every town and village with several 
rows — even the towns which are thirty miles or so from 
the front. It is a colossal work, which has involved the 
labor of hundreds of thousands. 

This is a long letter for me, and there are many more 
things I should like to say. I have not time to read it over 
and correct it, but if there is anything of interest in it, you 
might have it copied and sent to Mrs. Gardner, Miss Beaux, 
Miss Sinkler, H. D. S., and to Helen. 

One delightful experience that I have had these last days 



was a rapidly developed acquaintance with a young Belgian 
officer bearing the remarkable name of Leon Theodor. He 
has been for months in the trenches, and has been separated 
from his family, who live in Brussels, since the beginning of 
the war. His father, a depute and head of the Brussels bar, 
is confined in Germany as a prisoner for having written a 
letter to the members of the bar defining the jurisdiction of 
the German courts. Leon was here for ten days on leave, 
and we lunched and dined together at different places, and 
had one long delightful horseback ride in the Bois. 

Next week I shall start off again on one of my long in- 
specting trips, Dunkirk, etc. 



XXV 

Paris, March iq, 1915. 
Dear Helen: 

I got a letter to-day from you enclosing some drawings 
of little Polly, with the words, "Come home" — also many 
clippings which I am always glad to have. Tell Polly I shall 
come home some day when the great war is over — but 
that, alas, won't be to-morrow. 

I am living a very different life from that of a few weeks 
ago. I have a pleasant little apartment in Neuilly, the 
suburb of Paris where our main hospital is located, and from 
here I make trips every week to look over the situation in 
our other hospital in Juilly or in one or another of the four 
ambulance sections along the front in the different armies. 
It takes me away for the present from the direct handling 
of the wounded, which I regret, but it is more important 
and more responsible work and full of opportunity for service 
as well as for interesting experiences. 

Paris is resuming its normal aspect, and now and then I 
hear a concert or an opera, or see a play, and now and then, 
when I am free, I run into town for lunch or dinner with 
friends who live here or who are passing through. 

One often thinks that the happiest days of one's life lie 
in the past, but I am sure that for me life has never before 
been so full of interest and real happiness as at present. 

I don't suppose that many in America realize what France 
has done and is doing. General Joffre has allowed no foreign 
journalists at the front, and no French generals or officials 
have given interviews. So you only read of the war from the 
British viewpoint. But the fact is that of the five hundred 
miles of frontier between the Channel and Switzerland, 
France has held and still holds all but about forty miles. 

1^1 



I know it because I have passed through the little band of 
the English lines several times. Of course, England has 
rendered inestimable service in clearing the seas and keeping 
them clear. But on the land France has borne ninety-five 
per cent of the burden. 

Nine departments of France are wholly or partially in- 
vaded and the Germans hold several important French 
cities, notably Lille, but every one is sure that they have 
reached their zenith as far as France is concerned. 

With love to you all. 

P.S. I got a telegram yesterday from mother, saying they 
were leaving home to spend Easter with you. Perhaps this 
will reach you while they are there. 



XXVI 

Paris, March 21, igi 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have imagined you to-day reading with perhaps some 
anxiety the accounts of the Zeppelin raid upon Paris last 
night. I have been hoping all along for the chance to see 
one of these much-named monsters, and last night, a still 
night with a half-moon, it came. At about 2 a.m. the guns 
at the fortifications notified the sleeping populace that, af- 
ter months of waiting, Zeppelins had been sighted and were 
rapidly approaching. The people leaned out of their windows 
or poured out into the streets everywhere to see the spec- 
tacle, and presently searchlights uncovered a tremendous, 
silver, cigar-shaped creature creeping through the heavens, 
and flaming streaks like rockets shot across the sky vainly 
trying to hit it. The Zeppelin mounted quickly, and almost 
before one knew it, had disappeared from view. Meanwhile, 
heavy explosions followed one after another, as the bombs 
dropped in our neighborhood, — one, as we learned this 
morning, having struck within a hundred yards of the 
American hospital. 

I set out early after breakfast to see the damage. A dozen 
or more bombs had been dropped on Paris and its suburbs, 
but no one, so far as I could learn, had been killed, only a 
few had been injured and no buildings of importance had 
been touched. The long-expected Zeppelin raid was a fiasco 
as far as actual results were concerned. As a spectacle for 
the Parisian populace, it offered an entertaining and thrilling 
experience. Of military significance, it had none. As an in- 
dication of German intentions, it did present, however, one 
more evidence, if any more were needed, of what "Kultur" 
means, a scientific veneer for fundamental barbarity — one 

C66] 



more example of the German disregard for the elementary- 
principles of humanity. Civilized people do not bombard 
uninvested cities without warning, but the Germans bom- 
barded Yarmouth and a number of uninvested, unfortified 
towns in England a few weeks ago, and they have dropped 
their bombs upon many sleeping French towns far from the 
zone of the armies, and no one is surprised that they should 
drop bombs haphazardly over Paris and other cities on 
the way here, as they did last night. Even in their own 
country the military men do not, as a rule, treat their 
civilians and their women as worthy of much considera- 
tion. Why should any one expect them to show a sense of 
chivalry toward the civilians and the women and children 
of other countries ? 

Four or five houses in Paris were more or less torn to 
pieces by the bombs, and in one, on the rue Voltaire near 
here, I picked up the fragment of a bomb which I enclose. 
It could tear quite a hole in a human body. In the house 
in which I found this piece of bomb three children were 
sleeping in a bed, and were precipitated from the second to 
the ground floor when the house collapsed, but they were 
not seriously hurt. 

This afternoon I attended the opera "Louise." Much of 
it is a kind of glorification of Paris, in which the story takes 
place. It was well sung and acted, and the audience was 
especially responsive to the songs about the beauties and the 
soul of Paris, doubtless thinking of the fortunate survival of 
their wonderful city, despite the wanton efforts of the Boches 
to do it harm. At the end of the opera came the "Chant du 
Depart," in which mothers and wives and sweethearts offer 
their sons and husbands and lovers to France, and then the 
"Marseillaise" thrillingly sung and played in an appropriate 
dramatic setting. 



XXVII 

Neuilly-sur-Seine, 
Monday, March 24, 1915. u p.m. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

I was dining downtown to-night in a brilliantly lighted 
restaurant, with throngs of soldiers, civilians, and women 
about me, when suddenly some one announced that the 
Zeppelins were signalled again and that all lights must be 
extinguished. Every one hurriedly paid his bill and got out 
into the street to see what there was to see. It was a rainy 
night, and not only was every street lamp extinguished, but 
the firemen blew bugles everywhere and made every citizen 
extinguish the lights in his house. Paris, the city of light, 
was for once a city of complete darkness. We got into a 
taxi, six of us, and without lights rolled along up the Champs 
Elysees to the house of an acquaintance, where we mounted 
to the roof and waited, hoping every moment that the mon- 
ster would arrive, but nothing happened. People waited in 
vain in all the open squares, expecting a repetition of Satur- 
day night's spectacle. Occasionally one saw an investigating 
searchlight flash across the clouds, but nothing more. The 
aviators who defend Paris, but who on Saturday night were 
not on their jobs and nowhere to be found at the critical 
moment, were at their places to-night, and the Zeppelins, it 
is said, turned back. 

No one takes the Zeppelins very seriously after Saturday's 
feeble performance — under the most favorable conditions 
of weather and careless military precautions. Toward mid- 
night Paris returned to bed, disappointed, when the firemen 
rode through the streets bugling the signal that means " all 
is over." 

[68] 



Wednesday, March 26, 1915. 11 p.m. - 
I was just getting Into bed to-night when a fireman whis- 
tled under my window and called to me to extinguish the 
lights. I turned out everything except a single candle, and 
pulled the curtain ; but even that was not satisfactory to the 
cautious guardians. Every suspicion of a light had to be 
extinguished, so I was left in the dark. I was quite unwilling 
to go to bed and miss the spectacle, so I dressed without a 
light and went over to the hospital, where one has plenty of 
space to survey the heavens. Zeppelins had been signalled 
from Chantilly. The people in the hospital were all up and 
expectant, but nothing else happened, and I must go reluc- 
tantly and disappointedly to bed. 



XXVIII 

Compiegne, March 27. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

The scene has changed again and I woke up this morning 
in the Palace Hotel, Compiegne, and from my window 
looked out at the beautiful old palace where many kings and 
one or two emperors of France lived in the days before 
France had shaken off their yoke. We are on the way to the 
centre of the eastern armies, where I am going to try to 
arrange to have some of our new sections sent. 

We stopped at Beauvais yesterday to see our men there. 
To-day we go on, following the army line about twelve or 
fifteen miles inland, past Soissons, Rheims, Chalons-sur- 
Marne, to Vittel, some two hundred or more miles from 
here. It would be interesting to pass through Soissons and 
Rheims, but the roads near both places are continually 
under fire and it is impossible. 

Here in Compiegne Mr. John D. Rockefeller has given a 
hospital which is under the direction of the famous Dr. 
Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. 
Mr. Rockefeller and one of his daughters, I believe, have 
spent two summers in Compiegne, hence his interest. It is 
installed in a sumptuous hotel, the Rond Royal, and is 
named the Ambulance Carrel. We called there last night 
and were shown about the place by Dr. Carrel, a very alert 
little man who is naturally proud of the hospital bearing his 
name, and which he has just finished equipping with every 
arrangement that modern science and surgery can provide. 

After all, Americans are doing a good deal for France. 
There are American hospitals scattered here and there all 
over the country, and it would be interesting to get together 
a list of them which would show the real magnitude of 
America's contribution to the hospital work of France. 

[70] 



Hotel du Commerce, 
Neufchdtel {in the Fosges), March 27. 8 p.m. 

We left Compiegne about 9.30 and had a fine day's run; 
first through the Forest of Compiegne, then on past the 
many-towered chateau of Pierrefond, and on and on past 
convoys of ambulances returning from the battle-front, and 
long convoys of automobiles — many of them Pierce-Arrows, 
Packards, and Whites — carrying provisions, baled hay and 
straw to the front ; here and there a group of mounted cav- 
alry officers in brilliant uniform; now and then a group of 
red-trousered soldiers; now through the crooked streets of 
little villages with lichen-covered plaster houses which would 
have been picturesque even in times of peace, but which 
were doubly so when gay with uniformed soldiers. Then on 
over the fields, valleys, and rolling hills, and as we ran 
through the valley of the Marne we occasionally stopped at 
some soldier's grave by the wayside, covered with wreaths 
and flowers, or by a flag-covered mound where fifty or sixty 
soldiers were buried, their hats hanging from stakes above 
the graves, or at some village, farmhouse, or church de- 
stroyed by the ruthless enemy in that terrific onslaught 
early last September when the Germans thought they could 
brutalize France into surrendering. 

There can be no doubt that they committed unbelievably 
barbarous crimes in those days. I have recently read a little 
book, which ought to be translated into English and pub- 
lished broadcast, called "German Crimes as Told in German 
Documents," by Professor Bedier, historian in the University 
of Paris, in which he reprints page after page in facsimile of 
diaries and letters taken from German prisoners and German 
wounded, telling of the massacres of civilians, including 
women and children, and of the wilful pillage and destruc- 
tion of private property in those days. I have sent several 
copies to influential Americans, with the hope that some 

[70 



one will have it translated and republished in the United 
States. 

Of late the Germans have been more moderate. They 
have slowly come to realize that their barbarous methods 
have not produced terror, but undying hate on the part of 
the peoples directly affected, and loathing and contempt on 
the part of the rest of the world. How stupid, too, was their 
policy of murder and destruction in the regions like Belgium 
which they hoped permanently to retain! On the other 
hand, the Germans need not fear, that if some day the 
French army gets into German territory chivalrous France 
will follow their brutish example. 

And so the day has passed like a moving picture. There 
have been glimpses of many lovely bits of ancient French 
architecture, churches, chateaux, town halls, and other build- 
ings, many untouched and others mutilated ; many glimpses 
of trenches, many glimpses of soldiers manoeuvring in the 
fields, and then, above all, the continual panorama of the 
doux pays de France, than which there is none more beau- 
tiful in the world. 

It has been a sunny day, like the days in America when 
the wind blows from the northwest, with clear, blue sky, 
bright sunlight, and crisp air. We have travelled seldom 
more slowly than fifty miles an hour, sometimes running up 
to sixty, for the roads in France are incredibly good. You 
can imagine that I am sleepy and ready for a comfortable 
bed in this clean provincial inn. 

Hotel Lorraine, 

Vittel (in the Vosges), March 27. 

We are here until to-morrow in what is one of the finest 

summer resorts of France, a little city of immense stone 

hotels, usually thronged in summer by wealthy people of all 

countries taking their cures at the medicinal springs. It has 



a theatre, casino, polo-field, and race-track, and the whole 
nestles down in an open valley among the foothills of the 
mountains on the Alsatian border. This year the hotels, 
which have nearly five thousand beds, will be occupied by 
wounded soldiers. There will be no races, no polo, no operas, 
or fashionable cures. 

I hope to arrange, through the officers here, to have one 
of our sections sent into French Alsace, and with Captain 
de Montravel, who is charged with the automobile service 
in the eastern armies, whom I came on here to see, and whose 
acquaintance I made last night, I am to visit several towns 
on the Alsatian frontier to-morrow to see what can be done. 

It is much colder here than in Paris. The trees are not yet 
in bud, and the little shops of the town are just opening after 
months of hibernation. 

Palm Sunday night, 

Bar-le-Duc, March 28. 

Palm Sunday night, and we are in the home of the fam- 
ous confiture preparing to spend the night. The streets, res- 
taurants, and hotels are thronged with soldiers, and we had 
difficulty finding rooms, but at last found two under the 
roof of a rather second-rate hotel. There is one thing about 
France — even in the small hotels of small towns, the beds 
are covered with clean linen, and there is a kind of homelike 
touch to the rooms. There is a charm, too, about the uneven 
floors, low ceilings, thick stone walls, and the quaint views 
from their casement windows that compensates for the lack 
of modern plumbing and convenient electric lights. We 
tried to get some of the Bar-le-Duc currant jelly at dinner, 
but they told us that it was mostly made for export to 
America, and was seldom seen here. 

When we looked out of our windows in Vittel this morn- 
ing, we saw more snow than I had seen in Paris or Dunkirk 



all winter. During the night the hills and valleys had been 
painted over with about two inches of fresh white snow, 
every field blanketed, every twig of every pine tree weighted 
down. 

We left at eight o'clock for Remiremont, a town near the 
frontier, following in our automobile the machine of Captain 
de Montravel, with whom I had been negotiating for our 
next ambulance section and who offered to take me about 
to see other French officials concerned with the matter. We 
whirled over ridge after ridge, each opening up new pano- 
ramas of snow-covered valleys, always nearer and nearer to 
the frontier of Alsace, until finally we could look up the 
valley to the ridge, about eight miles away, which was for 
forty-four years the boundary between Germany and France, 
but which, God willing, will never again be so. 

In Remiremont they were just bringing in about four 
hundred German prisoners with six German officers, taken 
at Hartmannsweilerkopf the day before. It was an inci- 
dental victory of some importance, although the official 
communications only devoted a few lines to it. Hartmanns- 
weilerkopf is a height on the other side of the Vosges Moun- 
tains which commands the valley down to the Rhine. The 
French had been struggling to get it all through the winter, 
and at last it was theirs. We should have liked to go up 
into Alsace, but with a full day ahead of us and more than 
three hundred miles back to Paris we postponed that ex- 
perience until next time. 

My hope is that we can persuade the French officials to 
send one of our sections into Alsace. I tell them that it 
would annoy the Germans to read in the American papers 
that American volunteers were serving with the French in 
what a year ago was German territory. It would show for 
one thing that the French are actually in Alsace. Captain 
de Montravel, who is a warm-hearted Southerner and who 

[74] 



received us with open arms, seemed to like the idea, but 
Captain Doumenc, of Joffre's staff, whom we met at Remire- 
mont, had to be persuaded, and suggested that we send a 
section on to Vittel and let de Montravel look it over be- 
fore deciding. 

Speaking of Alsace reminds me that I sent to little Helen 
the other day a copy of Hansi's "Mon Village," the book 
about an Alsatian town, tenderly written and charmingly 
drawn, which appeared about three years ago and which 
resulted in the imprisonment of its author by the Germans, 
who disapproved of his gentle irony. 

I have not time to begin to register half that I have seen 
and felt to-day. The principal thing is that I succeeded in 
arranging to send a section of ambulances to the Vosges at 
the end of this week, and if they make a good record I have 
the promise of Captain de Montravel that when we send 
the next section, he will try to persuade Captain Doumenc 
to send the first one on to Alsace. 

On the way back we came through Nancy, the old capital 
of Lorraine, about ten miles from the German frontier. It 
is the most sumptuous little city that I have ever seen, with 
wonderful old squares of seventeenth and eighteenth century 
French architecture that ravish the eye with their symmetry. 
They say that last September the Kaiser, with ten thousand 
soldiers in parade uniform, stood waiting on a ridge about 
ten miles distant, expecting Nancy to be taken, and pre- 
pared to make his triumphal entry. He had doubtless seen 
pictures of the place and felt it would be an appropriate 
setting for the sort of grandiose pageantry with which he 
likes to surround himself. They hoped the Crown Prince 
would enter Paris about the same time; but Nancy could 
not be taken any more than Paris. 

Every now and then one of the German airmen drops a 
bomb on Nancy, as happened this very afternoon, killing an 

1751 



unoffending woman and child ; but, relatively speaking, the 
city has not been touched by the Germans, although it is 
only ten or a dozen miles from the German line. The streets 
this afternoon looked as gay and happy with their Sunday 
crowds as if there were no war. 

Paris, March 29. 

We got to Paris this evening, having covered twelve hun- 
dred kilometres in four days. All day to-day we were run- 
ning through the battlefields that surround the little river 
Marne, the scene of one of the most momentous struggles of 
all time, when the German hordes were halted last Septem- 
ber after almost reaching the very gates of Paris. 

We have passed village after village of which nothing re- 
mained but charred walls and chimneys and twisted pipes, 
burnt from end to end by the Germans because the people 
offered resistance. The devastation is pitiful. Town after 
town looks like Salem after the fire. Time and again we 
stopped and talked with the inhabitants who remained. 
Sometimes one house was left standing in the village, and 
there all the women have congregated and are living to- 
gether. In one case I found an old woman living in a cellar. 
In other cases a room or two was miraculously left intact, 
and there the women and children of the family are living. 
Their men are all at the war, so nothing has been rebuilt in 
the six months since the Germans were driven back. 

One, of course, must recognize that war means destruc- 
tion, and one should expect to find roofs torn open and walls 
pierced by shells, but the Germans were not content with the 
ordinary ravages of war. They proposed to terrify the people 
of France into surrender by the utter brutality of their 
methods of conducting the war. I have passed to-day 
through town after town which the Germans had deliberately 
burned and destroyed, and I have heard from the people 
how German soldiers, under officers' commands, went from 

[76] 



house to house with inflammable material. These are the 
names of some of the towns as I recall them: Revigny, 
Heiltz, Thieblement, Pargny, Sermaize. What a pity that 
the Americans of German descent, many of whom or 
whose ancestors left Germany to escape the hardships and 
oppressions of militarism, and who have been proud of 
our peaceful, self-governing democracy in America, should 
have allowed themselves to be deluded by the extensive 
propaganda of the German Government and should to-day 
be defending a government that represents the spirit of the 
Dark Ages, that recognizes no law or obligation, human or 
divine, if it conflicts with what they regard as their interests. 

One of the things I noted to-day was the number of 
women, children, and old men working in the fields. I was 
often tempted to get out and snap a picture of some woman 
driving a plough or harrow, or some elderly couple driving 
a wagon to market, or some boy swinging along across a 
field sowing grain. 

Easter Sunday. Paris, April 4. 

I have kept this letter all the week hoping to be able to 
add to it, but we have been so busy getting our section ready 
to send to the Vosges that I have not been able to spare a 
minute until the end of the day, when the spirit was no 
longer willing. Yesterday the section started and it will 
arrive some time Monday, twelve cars and sixteen men. I 
selected the men with the utmost care, picking here and 
there among our western sections, and making myself more 
or less unpopular thereby. They are all college men, and 
Richard Lawrence, Harvard, '02, is to be their chief. From 
the point of view of a stock farm for breeding purposes, they 
leave nothing to be desired. I feel sure that they will "make 
good" ; that de Montravel will recognize the type of men that 
they are. The future of our service depends upon them, and 
I told them so. 



XXIX 

Neuilly-sur-Seine, April 7, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have received three letters from you from Boston, the 
last two of which were numbered 1 and 2 — and the last of 
which was dated March 22. I judge from the continuity of 
your letters that they have all reached me. I get letters more 
or less regularly from C. B. and C. S. S. and Isabella. I am 
so glad that you saw her and the marvellous new rooms she 
has added to Fenway Court. Is n't she a dear and wonderful 
person? And the great tapestry room! How fortunate that 
the Germans can't molest it ! It is the sort of place that some 
of the German officers would enjoy looting and defiling and 
then burning. 

I am starting off to-morrow for a trip to Dunkirk and the 
north, and next week I shall go again to the Vosges to see 
our new section — about all Harvard men — which has just 
gone out. 

I am living a very normal civilian sort of life now. Paris 
is just about as it always is — only without Americans and 
other tourists, and with very few theatres, and at night the 
restaurants all close at 10 p.m. 

My life is full of interest, but I miss somewhat the in- 
tensely human things that I used to see so much of in 
Dunkirk. 



H78H 



XXX 

La Panne, Belgium, 

April 8, iqi 5. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

On this trip I have visited our men in Beauvais, St. Pol, 
Hesdin, and Dunkirk. To-night I am in Belgium — to be 
exact, in the little northwest corner of Belgium that still 
remains in Belgian hands. To be still more exact, I am in 
the erstwhile watering-place La Panne, which is now the 
capital in which the brave King Albert and his wife live. 

The little city seems to contain all of the young Belgians 
still extant. The streets until dark were thronged with joy- 
ful youths in uniform, thousands and thousands of them 
crowding not only the sidewalks, but the middle of the 
streets. To-day, being King Albert's birthday, there was an 
immense review on the beach. Belgian flags were flying from 
most of the large houses, and when we arrived the soldiers 
were having sack-races in the streets, boat-races on the shore, 
and competitions of various kinds to fete the day. 

I like the trim, dark-blue uniforms of the Belgian soldiers. 
Most of them seem very young, and although they are cut 
off from their homes they have the air of being embarked 
on a great adventure. They seem more often gay and lark- 
ing than depressed. With the mothers and fathers over in 
the German lines it is probably a very different story. 

This afternoon, as we set out from Dunkirk, we, too, 
were caught by the spirit of adventure, and although our 
passes only read to La Panne, an officer gave us the pass- 
word, the word for the day, in the Belgian lines, and advised 
us to go on and see Nieuport ; so we went through Furnes, 
where great holes in the walls and broken window panes 
show that shells occasionally strike, and on past company 

[793 



after company of soldiers, some going toward, some coming 
from, the front; past moving companies of artillery, past 
armored motor cars filled with smiling youths; past little 
village after village, past sentry after sentry, who saluted 
and beckoned us to go on when we gave the word; past 
trenches and trenches, and finally, almost of a sudden, we 
reached a point where human beings disappeared, very much 
as in ascending a mountain one reaches the line where trees 
cease to grow. The houses and farms were deserted. No 
one was walking by the roadside. It was the region within 
shell fire. Every now and then a deep hole in the road gave 
evidence of that. 

About two miles farther on we reached Nieuport. It is 
the first city I have seen that had been destroyed by shells, 
and I presume that Dixmude, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, 
Rheims, and many other places look like it. It must have 
been quite a prosperous town, judging from the fronts of 
some of the residences, but not a roof or wall remains intact. 
The streets are littered with house-fronts and their contents, 
tables, chairs, mattresses, and everything having poured out 
when the houses gave way before the monstrous shells. 
Here were tenantless stores with gaping walls and roofs, 
with goods, damaged by exposure, still on the counters. I 
walked into one and took a candlestick from the shelf. 
Here and there were the ruins of what was once a church, — 
not blackened by fire, but just shot to pieces, — and all 
around the ruins of the principal church were scores and 
scores of fresh graves marked only by crosses of rough wood. 
Not a living inhabitant remained, and there was scarcely a 
tree that had not been torn to pieces. 

We were startled, when in the centre of the town, by a 
loud explosion, then another, and then another, but a sentry 
poked his head from behind a wall and told us it was a 
departure from one of our own French guns, and that while 

[80] 



the Germans dropped a few shells in the town every day, 
they had not done so to-day. It was a curious fact about 
these cannon, which were being fired within a quarter of 
a mile of us, that we could not detect their location. They 
are half-buried and concealed by pine boughs. The powder 
is smokeless, and one heard the explosion without being able 
to say from whence it came. We watched and watched as 
we drove back, and heard at least a dozen heavy reports in 
our vicinity without being able once to tell where the cannon 
were. On the whole, Nieuport, abandoned by all but the 
sentries and silent except for the cannon, offered the most 
impressive picture I have yet seen of the devastation of the 
war. 

As I go to bed to-night in La Panne, I hear only the wash 
of the waves on the beach under my window, and I know 
I shall sleep well. 

Hesdin, April p, 191 5. 

Another interesting day. We woke up in La Panne and 
the Belgian Minister of the Interior, M. Berryer, with whom 
we had a conversation about sending some ambulances to 
help evacuate a number of Belgian towns infected with 
typhoid, arranged to have us return by way of Ypres. With 
his help we got a pass through the Belgian lines and had it 
viseed by the Prince of Teck at the English Mission in La 
Panne, so that we should have no difficulty in the English 
lines, and about noon we set out on the road through Furnes 
to Ypres. 

It was one of the finest of spring days and we tore on 
through the quaint Flemish towns, one after another, and 
over a pleasant, highly cultivated country, crossing the 
famous little river Yser on the way. These famous rivers of 
the war invariably surprise one by their smallness. The 
Yser, more or less swollen by the spring rains, looked much 



like the Concord River, the flood by which "the embattled 
farmers stood " upwards of one hundred and forty years ago. 
I As we neared Ypres, the uniforms of the crowds of soldiers 
that we passed changed from Belgian dark blue to the 
British khaki, and we ran into Canadians, Scotchmen, Aus- 
tralians, and other British varieties, but no Indian troops. 
I don't know where they have all gone. Some say they have 
proved a failure, but whether or not that is true they seem 
to have disappeared from this part of the map. The English 
are pushing in with vast numbers in the neighborhood of 
Ypres, and are probably widening somewhat the little strip 
of the front line which England has been maintaining. Even 
now the English do not hold, however, more than twenty- 
five or thirty miles of the five hundred miles of front. The 
Belgians hold perhaps ten miles, and all the rest is held by 
the French. 

Ypres presents a sad spectacle. Here was fought last No- 
vember and December one of the greatest battles of this 
great war; the battle in which the Germans were prevented 
from reaching Calais, and just as, when defeated in their 
effort to reach Paris, the Germans took revenge on the 
wonderful architecture of Rheims, so here they wreaked 
their vengeance for thwarted aims on the beautiful buildings 
of Ypres. The Cathedral and the wonderful old Halles 
which sheltered the market, an architectural treasure covered 
with sculptured tracery and statues, which had survived 
the ravages of centuries of storms and battles, were made 
the targets, and now they are torn and mutilated so that 
they can never be repaired. The architectural losses are 
irreparable. It stirs one beyond the power of articulate 
expression to see what a scourge to architecture, one might 
even say what an enemy to the finest artistic achievements 
of the human race, this self-styled Kultur folk have been. 
As long as history endures they will be classed, as they are 

C82] 



classed to-day by their contemporaries, with the Huns and 
Vandals and brutish hordes of antiquity. Things of beauty 
that should have been a joy for generations and generations 
to come are gone forever, and the Germans are their delib- 
erate destroyers. There can be no question that they de- 
liberately selected these monuments for destruction. The 
completeness of their annihilation in the midst of other build- 
ings that remain is indisputable evidence of the fact. 

While we were in Ypres this afternoon several shells struck 
in different parts of the town, and it was extraordinary to 
see the throngs of English soldiers walking about as non- 
chalantly as if the Germans were a thousand miles away. 
Many of the stores are still open. Women, children, and 
literally thousands of soldiers were strolling about looking 
at the bombarded buildings as they might in ordinary times 
look at the effects of a city fire. And meanwhile at intervals 
the bombardment was going on. 

We stayed about an hour, got a bit of lunch in a cafe, and 
then ran on and stopped for a few moments at Cassel, where 
I saw Rene Puaux, my genial friend who is still there on 
General Foch's staff. 

To-night I have stopped in Hesdin to arrange for the 

withdrawal of our ambulances from the Army, where 

they seem to have been more or less superfluous, in order to 
send them to other places where they are needed. All this 
requires complying with much red tape and the seeing of 
many officials. 

Paris, April u, 191 5. 

I got back again to the quiet of Neuilly last night, and as 
a friend is going to America, leaving to-day, I shall give 
this letter to him to mail. 

I am perfectly well, and find life full of opportunities to 
help and full of interest. 



XXXI 

Letter published in the Boston Herald, April 28, 191 5 
WHAT FRANCE IS DOING 

BY A BAY-STATE MAN WHO IS ON THE GROUND 

To the Editor of the Herald: 

It is a disappointing, but explicable fact that the "Boston 
Herald" and most American papers envisage the war as 
primarily a struggle between Germany on the one hand and 
England and Russia on the other, while France is treated 
as a factor of only secondary importance, almost like Austria, 
or Belgium or Serbia. 

The reasons for this attitude are not far to seek. What- 
ever news our papers receive from the Allies' side of the 
scenes of war comes through correspondents who, whether 
American or English by origin, are affiliated with English 
papers, and are naturally more interested in providing their 
readers with accounts of movements and engagements in- 
volving British troops, the brothers, sons, and acquaintances 
of their readers, than with stories of the activities and ex- 
periences of the French armies in which their public has no 
direct personal interest. Not only is this natural, but it has 
been made inevitable by the policy of the French General 
Staff, which has allowed no correspondents, whether English, 
American, or even French, within their lines. Interested 
primarily in the military problems, anxious at whatever cost 
to eliminate the possible dangers of publicity, regardless of 
any of its possible diplomatic benefits, the Staff has refused 
access to the front, not only to English and American jour- 
nalists, but also to their own. Not infrequently the only ac- 
counts printed in France of French engagements of no mean 
importance are the dry, laconic two or three lines of the 



official "communiques," "our troops made progress," or, 
"we made considerable gains" in such or such a place. 

A fortnight ago I happened to be in the Vosges at the time 
of the capture of Hartmannsweilerkopf, a ridge on the other 
side of the Alsatian Mountains, which commands the valley 
at that point down to the Rhine. For two months the French 
troops had been contending for the height, and at last it was 
theirs. Some four hundred German prisoners, including five 
or six officers, taken in the engagement, were just being 
brought into Remiremont in the Vosges the day of my ar- 
rival, and the local French officials were elated by the situa- 
tion. We scrutinized the papers next day for some vivid 
account of the engagement such as we had heard in the 
vicinity, but we only found the dry and bloodless announce- 
ment, "Our troops took Hartmannsweilerkopf yesterday." 

French generals and cabinet officials have rarely if ever 
given interviews or allowed their names to be signed to 
articles. No Frenchman of any considerable importance has 
visited America since the war began. Not one sou has ap- 
parently been spent in endeavoring to interest or to influence 
American opinion in favor of France. France has pursued 
the even tenor of her way through the war. Not only has 
she not resorted to publicity agents, press bureaus, special 
envoys, braggadocio interviews with ambassadors and gen- 
erals, or any of the other methods of fostering foreign feeling, 
which the Germans have made familiar, but she has even 
interfered with the natural and appropriate publication of 
what has been happening in France, and of what we in 
America, because of our traditional friendship and sympathy 
with France, and our similarity of political institutions and 
ideals, would have been glad to know. 

These, I believe, are the principal reasons for the curious 
undervaluation on the part of the American press of the 
contribution which France has made and is making to the 

[85] 



war. Probably not one American in ten thousand knows 
that of the approximately five hundred miles of the western 
battle-front, France has held, and still holds, all but about 
thirty-five, that England has never held more than twenty 
or twenty-five miles, and Belgium not more than a dozen 
miles. Yet such are the known and indisputable facts. I 
know them because I have several times crossed through 
the British and Belgian sectors. 

Up to the end of December, I have been told by credible 
authority, it is estimated that France had lost about two 
hundred and fifty thousand killed (not including wounded 
and prisoners), and I also believe, upon equally good au- 
thority, that the total of British troops, which until recently 
had been sent across the Channel, numbered scarcely more 
than that. In other words, France had lost, in actually 
killed, almost the equivalent of the whole British fighting 
army. 

I say this, not in disparagement of England's contribution 
to the war. Her assistance on the sea has been of supreme 
importance, and the valor of her soldiers, both on land and 
on sea, has been demonstrated beyond question. I say it 
only to give a just perspective as to what France is doing. 

We owe to France, politically and spiritually, debts which 
we can never repay. It was to the spirit of revolutionary 
France that we owe much of the spirit of our own Revolution. 
It was to France with her armies and her fleet and her ex- 
penditures of seven hundred million of dollars in our behalf 
that we owe our independence. And neither then nor since 
then has she ever asked for anything in recompense. France 
is the only other great country in the world without a heredi- 
tary ruling class, where the spirit of democracy prevails and 
the people rule. To the schools of France we owe practi- 
cally everything that we have in America that is worth 
while in architecture, painting, and sculpture. France is a 

X863 



peaceful and unmilitary democracy whose energies have for 
generations been devoted primarily to the arts of peace. 

Our sympathies as Americans, believing in democratic 
government, detesting militarism, and mindful of what 
France has done for us, ought to be wholly with France in 
this struggle against a mediaeval monarchy opposed in 
every way to our own historical ideals. I believe that they 
are so, but I also am confident that we should have been 
more actively on the side of France if it had been brought 
home to us by our press how much this is France's war. 

To those of us who still believe in the ideals of the founders 
of our government and who have no sympathy with the 
savagery of medievalism, who believe in popular govern- 
ment and not hereditary rule, to those who care for the 
peaceful advance of civilization and would like to see forever 
doomed the " Kultur" of mailed fists and war lords, without 
regard for solemn pledges, international law, or any other 
right than that of might, it will always be a source of humili- 
ation and regret that America has not displayed a more ac- 
tive sympathy with those ideals for which she used to stand, 
in this momentous period of their history. 

A. Piatt Andrew. 

Paris, April II, 1915. 



XXXII 

Remiremont {in the Fosges), 

April 14, 191 5. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

Another day to live forever in my memory: I have motored 
for miles and miles with French soldiers in Alsace. 

I wrote you a couple of weeks ago about my first trip to the 
Vosges to try and arrange for a section of our ambulance to 
serve in Alsace, and how I had found several French officers 
in the region who were enthusiastic about the project, and 
how I returned to Paris and got together a "crack" section, 
mostly Harvard men, with Richard Lawrence, Harvard, '02, 
as chief, and how within three days we had them started east. 
They went first to Vittel and the officers liked them, very 
much apparently. Two days later they were sent a little 
farther east, and two days after that still farther, and now 
they are stationed just this side of the pass that marks the 
boundary of Alsace, and each day they run up over the pass 
and down into the valley on the other side, where they get 
the wounded in various Alsatian towns within sound of the 
German guns. 

So yesterday I started east again to see how things were 
going and to arrange for another section. We flew again up 
the valley of the Marne, now much more verdant than a 
fortnight ago, covering about three hundred and fifty kilo- 
metres in an afternoon, and arrived in Vittel in time to find 
Captain de Montravel and Lieutenant Paquet still at dinner. 
They told us how our boys had arrived ten days before in 
a pouring rain, but with their hoods up so that they could 
see all that was to be seen as they passed through the valley 
of the Marne; how the moment they arrived a train of 
wounded had come in, and how efficiently they had des- 

[88] 



patched the work of carrying them to the hospitals; how 
ready and willing they all were; how expert in repairing 
their machines; how they were up at six in the morning 
with radiators and tanks filled, brass polished and ready for 
work, — what thoroughbred gentlemen they all were, — in 
fact, a glowing account, which was very gratifying. 

And so I went on to-day to see our men and to set foot 
for the first time in Alsace. We found them located in a 
pretty little village, St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, just this side 
of the frontier, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. 
And then we went on, several French officers and myself, 
through the tunnel that used to mark the boundary between 
Germany and France (I will send you some photographs I 
took of the two sides of the tunnel), and came out in the 
promised land. I have never seen a more beautiful outlook 
than that which strikes you almost as soon as you emerge 
from the tunnel. You look down for miles on a narrow, 
highly cultivated valley, dotted with red-roofed villages and 
bulwarked all about by the silent, snow-capped hills. One 
saw the pictures of Hansi in real life. 

I have not time to tell you much of what we saw or much 
of what I felt as we rolled down the ridge and through the 
valley past town after town, now part of France again after 
forty-five years, the signs still in German over the hotels 
and stores, the children waving their hats at us as we passed, 
the crowds of French soldiers, the old Paris autobuses run- 
ning here and there in these strange surroundings, loaded 
with meat, our own little ambulances passing now and then, 
the distant boom of the guns. I wish I could find time to 
register them. I snapped a lot of kodaks, and I am afraid 
I must leave it to them to tell the story. 

It was one of the happiest, most interesting, most beauti- 
ful days that I have ever spent. 

[8 9 ] 



Paris, April 23, 1915. 

I intended to write this letter over and greatly to extend 
it, but my work the past week has been too absorbing. The 
following day after the one I spent in Alsace, we motored 
over three hundred miles back to Paris, and since then I 
have literally not had a moment's time to myself. Captain 
de Montravel liked our first section so well that he wanted 
another right away, so we got back the section from Beau- 
vais, and revamped it somewhat, and succeeded in getting 
it off for the east three days after I returned. It is located 
somewhere near Nancy. Since then I have been on another 
trip to Dunkirk, and have had a terrific amount of work to 
do straightening out affairs in the office here in Neuilly, 
where everything has been at sixes and sevens. 



XXXIII 

April 23, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Here are some pictures which I took on the day we spent 
in Alsace — the Alsace which used to be German, but which, 
God willing, never will be so again. You will see the German 
signs over hotels and the railway station where I am standing 
with French officers. It was one of the happiest days I have 
ever spent in some of the most beautiful surroundings that 
I have ever seen. One does not wonder, after visiting Alsace, 
that a beauty-loving people like the French could not endure 
seeing it taken from them by the Germans. These pictures 
show that France has recovered at least a part of Alsace. 



C90 



XXXIV 

N euilly-sur-Seine, 

Sunday, April 25, 1915. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

I made a flying trip to Dunkirk this week, — ran up one 
day and came back the next; it is about two hundred and 
forty miles each way, and a rather hard trip, but I enjoyed 
it because we stopped over night in a little inn in Cassel, 
where I spent several hours with Rene Puaux, who always 
knows everything that is going on, and is a most delightful 
and diverting companion. 

It was the night after Garros had been captured by the 
Germans, and Rene, who knew him well, was greatly sad- 
dened, both because of his personal loss and because of the 
loss to the army. I used to see Garros flying over Dunkirk. 
He was stationed in one of the environing villages, St. Pol, 
and often toward dusk during the winter we would see him 
flying home from some mission in his monoplane. You could 
not mistake any one else for him, for no one else ever flew 
with the grace and ease of Garros. He could close off his 
motor and float like a gull, dipping, and soaring, and turn- 
ing, now this way, now that, until it seemed incredible that 
it was a machine and not a bird you were watching in the 
sky. It was a small machine with no place for a passenger, 
and with the propeller in front of the driver and a long fish- 
like tail behind. Just in front of the driver was a rapid-fire 
gun which he could operate with his foot as he manoeuvred 
the aeroplane with his hands, and as the gun was attached 
to his aeroplane and perfectly stationary he had to manoeu- 
vre the whole machine in order to aim at his enemy. You 
can see what a wonderful flyer he must have been. He was 
like a hawk. He could rise faster than the other machines and 



turn about more quickly, and the German flyers were greatly 
afraid of him, because he had brought down I don't know 
how many of them. One extraordinary mechanism that he 
had devised was an arrangement by which he could fire 
through the revolving propeller. It was estimated that the 
propeller would only be hit four times in a hundred shots, 
and at the point on the two blades where a bullet might hit 
were two metal tracks to divert it. I used to see all of this 
in Dunkirk, so I was particularly interested in Rene's story 
of what had happened to Garros the day before. Garros 
had already brought down two German aeroplanes, and 
when he came back that day they sent him out, though 
tired, and in a machine that had already been severely used, 
to drop bombs on a railway station, a mission which any 
of the scores of aviators might have successfully performed. 
Whether his engine stopped working or he was hit by a 
bullet, they did not know. But he did not come back, and 
night came on and still no word, and finally in the early 
morning they intercepted a German wireless message which 
told that Garros was a prisoner. 

I suspect that thousands of people had hoped that some 
day when the Kaiser or the Crown Prince was in Lille or 
Courtrai, Garros would be able to swoop down and fire on 
him. At any rate, he ought to have been reserved for the 
exceptional work, and not have been wasted on the easy 
and more or less futile work of trying to destroy a railway 
station, which is part of the everyday work of the average 
military aviator. Simply because he was a genius in flying 
they asked him to do everything. But — Garros is gone! 
And the Kaiser lives ! 

From another acquaintance we heard a great deal about 
the now famous battle between the English and the Germans 
at Neuve-Chapelle six weeks or so ago, when as you remem- 
ber more than ten thousand British were lost, killed, or 

[93] 



wounded. I remember the night of that day, when all night 
long trains of wounded were pouring into Paris-Plage where 
I was staying, and where our boys were working. Well, it 
appears that the British in one day fired thirty-six thousand 
shells, or more than were fired in the whole Boer War. It 
was a veritable hailstorm of shells which obliterated every- 
thing within range. The Germans who were not killed were 
routed, and orders were issued to the Germans in Lille, 
which was the real objective, to begin packing their things. 
But the English made two terrible blunders. In the first 
place, they let their men get too far ahead of their artillery, 
and it is said that hundreds of English soldiers were killed 
by their own guns, and then, after victory was in their 
hands, they apparently waited for twenty-four hours to 
decide what to do next, and that allowed the Germans to 
change their minds, to come back with reinforcements, and 
to reentrench themselves before the battle was resumed. 
A number of English generals were dismissed from the service 
immediately after the battle, but that could not bring their 
men back to life or achieve the lost victory. General French 
was quoted recently as saying that "if we are to vanquish 
our enemies, we require shells, still more shells and always 
more shells," and when this was quoted to another distin- 
guished officer, he is said to have remarked, "Yes, but it re- 
quires even more than shells, it requires a brain." 

The entrance of Italy into the war is now predicted for 
the very near future and with her on the side of the Allies will 
come sooner or later the Eastern Latin country, Roumania. 
Their military aid will not, perhaps, be very great, but it 
will help to cut Germany off from her present trade with the 
outside world, from horses, copper, petroleum, and other 
things. And it cannot but have an effect on the "morale" 
of the Austrians and Germans. Already the German papers 
have ceased to speak of the outcome of the war as a certain 

[94] 



victory. They speak rather of the impossibility of their 
being defeated, — and that is quite a step in advance. 

In France, on the other hand, every one feels confident 
of an ultimate victory, but those competent to judge seem 
to think that unless something unforeseen happens, the 
struggle will be long. "Long, dur, sur," is the laconic proph- 
ecy attibuted to General Foch. 



XXXV 

Dieulouard, near Pont-a-Mousson, 

Tuesday, April 28, 191$. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have had another interesting and memorable day. I 
came east yesterday to see how the second section had fared 
that we sent out two weeks ago. The first section went to 
Alsace, as I wrote you when I returned from there. It was 
a joy to know that they were well liked, well placed, doing 
good work, and very happy after the discouraging period 
that had gone before with almost nothing to do in the west. 
How was it to be with the second section ? 

I motored up to Vittel, about two hundred and twenty- 
five miles, and had dinner with my good friend Captain de 
Montravel, and had again a warm, enthusiastic welcome and 
a good report of the second section, which had spent two 
days under his critical eye in Vittel. They are now at a place 
of which I had never heard — Dieulouard, between Nancy 
and Pont-a-Mousson ; so we set off this morning to look them 

up and also to see the Commandant Bourgoin, of the 

Army Automobile Service, at Ligny-en-Barrois, under whom 
they serve. 

The day has been full of interesting and varied experi- 
ences. As we wound over the hills and valleys of the Vosges, 
we passed through a trim, little, red-roofed town basking 
in the warm spring sunshine, among green fields and peace- 
ful silence, and discovered that we were in Domremy, the 
village in which Jeanne d 'Arc was born ; so we went into the 
little church where she was baptized and had her first com- 
munion, and where she went to pray when she heard "the 
voices" in the neighboring fields; and we spent a quarter of 
an hour sitting before the flag-draped altar in the dim silence 

[96] 



of the church. The priest asked us to go with him to the 
house in which she spent her girlhood, a lovely little cottage 
in the midst of a garden surrounded by tall pines, and we 
visited the heavy-beamed room in which she is supposed to 
have been born. The priest whittled off a piece of one of the 
big beams and gave it to me, and I picked a sprig or two of 
flowers, perhaps the descendants of plants that grew there 
five hundred years ago when she was a child. And so the 
day began, and then we hurried on. 

About noon we reached Ligny, and I had a satisfactory 
interview with the commandant, found that he was pleased 
with what he had seen and heard of our men ; and then on 
and on, past soldiers, convoys, trenches, and towns for a 
couple of hours more, when suddenly, with a turn in the 
road, we came into the ancient crooked streets of the village 
of Dieulouard and found our ambulances and our men 
stationed in the shadow of a rambling old chateau. The 
boys were very glad to see us, especially as we brought heaps 
of mail, and they are thoroughly happy because at last they 
are located in the midst of things. A few of them are at 
Dieulouard, the rest at Pont-a-Mousson. Both places were 
under daily bombardment. The fields around are pitted 
with shell holes, and windows, walls, and roofs everywhere 
are pockmarked with the shrapnel. Two shells dropped here 
this afternoon after we arrived, from some unseen battery 
four miles away. One heard first the distant boom, then 
the whistle of the shell as it passed overhead, and another 
explosion as it burst. Just outside of Pont-a-Mousson, 
where we spent a couple of hours, is the wood called Bois- 
le-Pretre, where there has been terrific fighting for months, 
and where seventeen thousand Frenchmen are said to have 
given up their lives. We visited the dressing-stations and 
saw the men being brought in on a sort of wheelbarrow 
stretcher, and in one of the many improvised cemeteries 

1971 ' 



that dot the hillside we saw where a Harvard man, Andre 
Champollion, whom I used to know in Cambridge, and who 
was killed in the French army three weeks ago, was buried. 

To-night I am sleeping in one of the little French houses 
in the town. There has been no bombardment since this 
afternoon. The streets are silent under the moon, except as 
now and then a company of artillery or a convoy of supplies 
clatters by over the pavement. 

It is curious about these towns. Pont-a-Mousson has been 
bombarded not less than eighty-six times, and the neigh- 
boring villages as often or oftener; but most of the people 
seem to go on living here and go and come as if there were 
no war. There are crowds and crowds of soldiers, but many 
women and children too. 

How strange the world's history is. Who, a year ago, 
would have dreamed that these quiet, prosperous little towns, 
where people lived dull but complacent lives, would be 
thronged with gayly bedizened soldiers, with all their schools 
and churches and the larger houses turned into hospitals, 
with shells bursting at any hour of the day or night, shot 
by unseen cannon miles away, with aeroplanes dropping 
bombs, and all the other excitements and terrors of war? 
And a year from now their normal lives may be resumed! 
God grant it! 

I hope you can read my scrawls. I write them generally 
by candlelight in bed. My days are long, and I am always 
glad to get out of my heavy boots and leggings and tight 
uniform, and then I seize my one chance in the half-hour 
before I go to sleep to try and tell a little of what I am seeing 
and doing. 

Nancy, April 29, 191 5. 

I am writing again in the early morning — 5 a.m. I seize 
the chance because we are off again at about seven for St. 
Maurice-sur-Moselle and a visit to our section in Alsace. 

[98] 



"Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth 
knowledge." Yesterday said more to me about the war than 
any day that had gone before. When hereafter you read 
about Pont-a-Mousson or Bois-le-Pretre, you can think that 
to me they are no longer mere names on the map. One of 
the officers asked me yesterday if I had any desire to see 
some of their trenches, and in the morning word came from 
the general to meet his aide at nine o'clock in the little 
village of Juzzainville, not far from Pont-a-Mousson. 

That is the beginning of the story, and I wish I had time 
to try and communicate to you something of what we saw. 
One of the boys drove me over to Juzzainville in our staff 
car, and as we pushed through the crowds of soldiers in the 
streets and they saw our American flag, it was one continual 
salute, — " Vive 1 'Amerique " — " Good-morning,' ' " Vive 
les Americains." It makes one feel like a prince coming to 
his kingdom to be in this part of the country. They all 
appreciate so far beyond its desert our being here with them. 
Soldiers and officers alike have read the American reply to 
Germany and feel at last that we are their friends. But 
what a pity it is that we have been so late and so slow and 
so perfunctory! What a pity it is that in this great moment 
in the world's history we should have been afflicted with a 
third-rate Secretary of State and a President incapable of 
acting definitely! With the officers I never hesitate to say 
that the point of view of intelligent America has not been 
well represented by Wilson and Bryan, that as a people we 
still have ideals, and that we are not wholly given over to 
materialism and business as the Wilson-Bryan programme 
seems to indicate, that we believe with Colonel Roosevelt 
that our country ought to have protested and to have pro- 
tested vigorously and imperatively against the invasion of 
Belgium, the levying of such vast tributes from the Belgian 
cities, the bombardment of unfortified towns, the submarin- 

[99] 



ing of merchant vessels, the unnecessary massacre of towns 
and villages, and all of the other violations of humane con- 
ventions, and that we are humiliated that Wilson and Bryan 
should have made their first protest against England on a 
matter affecting the business of a few exporters. 

We found Major Long at Juzzainville and with him I 
visited the headquarters of General Riberpray in an old 
chateau, was invited by the general to lunch, and we were 
off for the famous Bois-le-Pretre. Never was there a more 
delicious spring morning — with warm sunshine, fragrant 
apple trees in full bloom, dandelions and violets by the 
roadside, and birds singing everywhere. We wound in the 
motor up the sloping hillside past groups of moving sol- 
diers, some coming back from the wood, others going up, 
past cemeteries of fresh graves, where twenty or thirty 
men were busily digging new places for the dead, and twenty 
or thirty more were covering graves just filled. Suddenly I 
was struck with horror as a lumber wagon came down the 
hill, and I discovered that it was a cartload of men who had 
given their lives during the night. They were piled five and 
six deep, — criss-cross, — perhaps two dozen of them, their 
lifeless legs and arms and heads hanging over the sides of 
the wagon ; and then we passed a little hut in which I saw 
a dozen or more other corpses sprawling on the floor as they 
had just been brought in. Of course, I thought it horrible, 
but my officer friend said, "Oh, yes, but we are used to it. 
One sees that every day." 

Toward the top of the hill one enters the famous wood 
— about four or five miles long. The birds were still 
singing everywhere, and all the trees coming into leaf. 
Nature was serene and tranquil. Now and then, as if a 
distant Fourth-of-July celebration were going on, one heard 
something like a giant firecracker, and occasionally one 
would hear something go whistling overhead above the 

Croo] 



treetops, and five or six seconds later a heavy door would 
seem to slam. 

Presently we turned into a ditch just high enough to 
overreach a man's head, and then on, through trench after 
trench, zigzagging and crossing each other like streets, 
and we found ourselves in what was really a great under- 
ground city, where literally thousands of men live. It is 
almost unbelievable the work that has been expended in 
building these trenches. Even in the little wood, Bois-le- 
Pretre, there are miles and miles and miles of them, with 
underground rooms for every sort of purpose — little sleep- 
ing-rooms, little dining-rooms, storehouses for ammunition 
of every sort. In the various caverns used as officers' head- 
quarters were always tables and chairs, pictures on the 
walls, which were often covered with oilcloth, always tele- 
phones, and not infrequently electric lights. 

The officers whom we met along the way all gave us a 
warm-hearted welcome. They generally had something to 
say about Lafayette and Washington and the fraternal rela- 
tions of France and America in the past. One delightful 
colonel (Colonel Rollet) made us sit down in his underground 
cavern, and ordered a bottle of good moselle and some cakes 
and drank a health to the United States, and I in turn told 
them that we could never forget that we owed to France 
our very existence as an entity, and I drank to the future 
France, greater and more glorious than ever, and to an 
early victory. 

They made us put on some loose, wrapper-like coats of a 
yellow-green, so that we should not be so visible to a chance 
aviator, and then we went on and on past groups of soldiers 
eating their rations in little caverns, past heaps of shells, 
past little mortars, past piles of hand grenades. Every now 
and then I poked my head out and looked at the forest, and 
never could I have believed that human beings could so 



devastate the face of nature. Literally for miles not a tree 
remains standing. Even the underbrush has been shot 
away. Only torn stumps of trees and branchless trunks re- 
main, as if a cyclone had swept over the region. It had been 
a cyclone — but a cyclone of shells and balls intended not 
to mutilate nature, but to kill men. 

I must confess to a little surprise at the sight of hand 
grenades. Could it be that they get so close to the enemy 
that they could throw things at them ? Of course, I knew 
that they had to make charges from one trench to another, 
and that then they used the bayonet, — but could they 
really throw things from one trench to another without 
leaving the trench? The captain laughed when I asked the 
question, and pointed to some guns eaten by acid that had 
been thrown across by the Germans the night before. Pres- 
ently we turned a corner into a ditch which bore the sign, 
"Toward the first line." The soldiers were getting thicker 
and thicker, and just ahead I could see a line of them with 
their rifles poked through holes in a wall of sandbags and 
all with their eyes glued to peekholes between these bags. 
The captain beckoned to me not to speak, but to take a 
look through one of the holes. Not more than sixty feet 
away was another row of sandbags. And behind those bags 
was the German firing line! Remembering how General 
Manoury had lost an eye a month ago when engaged in a 
similar occupation, a few brief glimpses sufficed for me. But 
we followed along this line for about a block. It was the line 
of brave boys who guard their country and many of whom 
doubtless will give their lives for that dear country — a line 
extending almost continuously for more than four hundred 
and fifty miles from the Channel to Switzerland. It was a 
picture I shall always remember — these hundreds of French 
lads silently standing and "watchfully waiting" within fifty 
to a hundred feet of the German firing line. 

[102] 



Yet they seemed smiling and content. They have their 
little jokes. At one point where the passage was narrow a 
wooden sign bore the words, "Passage of the Dardanelles" 
— and that trench led into another marked by the words, 
"Street of the Eunuchs." Over some of the little dugouts 
were the names of soldiers' wives or sweethearts, as "Villa 
Bertha," "Villa Marie," — or as if it were a little inn, "To 
the gay return from the trenches." Another was playfully 
labelled, "Palace of the seven virtues." One of the officers' 
shelters that I visited, which consisted of two comfortable 
rooms underground, was called the "Cave of Alibaba." 
The Germans who at one time occupied this part of the wood 
called it more lugubriously, though perhaps more accurately, 
"the witches' cauldron" {Hexenkessel) or "the Widow's 
wood" {Witwenwald). 

We spent perhaps two hours in the trenches in the de- 
vastated wood, and then came out again where we had 
entered, into the unspoiled wood. A cuckoo was singing as 
we came out, and other smaller birds. The contrast seemed 
strange between human savagery and the tranquillity of 
nature. 

The general had asked us to lunch with him and we 
arrived about noon at his chateau in the midst of peaceful, 
sunny gardens. General Riberpray had about a dozen fine- 
looking officers at his table, colonels, captains, lieutenants, 
and all grades down to sergeants, but they all treated each 
other like comrades of the same rank, and no one mentioned 
war. They discussed books and plays and history and there 
was a great deal of playful badinage, and you would never 
have believed that these were men spending their lives in 
the harsh work of war. It was a rule, they said, never to 
mention war at table. The old general placed me at his right, 
and toward the end of lunch our glasses were filled with 
champagne and he rose and lifted his glass with the kind of 



graceful tribute to the United States that came from and 
went right to the heart, such a speech as only a Frenchman 
can make. Then we walked out into the garden and had 
coffee under the trees, and who would have dreamed that 
France was at war! 

Two of the younger officers begged me to stay over. 
They wanted to show me Metz! So in the afternoon we 
went for a long walk to the top of a ridge called the Cote de 
Mousson, from which we could see the spires of the cathedral 
in Metz, which a year from now, God willing, will once 
more belong to France. 

On the way we passed through a cemetery, which had 
been subjected by the Germans to heavy bombardment. It 
was a pitiful sight, with scarcely a monument left intact, 
with vaults and graves torn open by shells, and coffins and 
bones exposed. Even the dead can't be left to rest in peace 
in these tumultuous times. 

Last evening we motored over to this charming little city 
of Nancy, and I have spent the night in a comfortable hotel 
with an electric light by my bed and a silk comforter to keep 
me warm. Only yesterday the German aviators dropped 
bombs about the beautiful Place Stanislaus, one of the best 
architectural groups in Europe, evidently trying to destroy 
here, as they have elsewhere, the precious monuments which 
France has inherited from her glorious past. They did not 
achieve their purpose, however, the bombs having dropped 
in the open square without damaging any of the buildings, 
though killing two women and a child. Such an achievement 
doubtless brings some satisfaction to the friends of " Deutsche 
Kultur," but how lacking in perception are those respon- 
sible for this kind of unchivalrous warfare ! They think they 
can terrify the French people into seeking peace by de- 
stroying their glorious churches and public buildings, and 
the treasures of their wonderful past — and by killing their 



women and children. It is poor psychology, that! Every 
church and architectural gem wantonly destroyed and every 
woman and child killed in an uninvested city only arouses 
new determination to push the war to its uttermost end, and 
to crush beyond recovery for generations a nation which has 
made itself a menace to civilization and a scourge to the 
human race. I have talked with French people of all classes 
from all parts of the country. They have no thought of 
yielding, whatever the cost, until the victory is complete. 
They expect the war to be long and costly, but as God reigns 
and right is right, they are certain as to the eventual out- 
come. 

St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, 

April 29, 191 5. 

This has been a day of surprises. We left Nancy at about 
8.30 under a warm summer sun and ended the day wading 
through snow-drifts two feet deep in the Vosges. 

We began with glimpses of as beautiful architecture as I 
have ever seen, and the day closed for us with a sunset 
scene from the mountain-top. Nancy is a charming little 
city, with beautiful fountains and parks and open squares 
surrounded by buildings of wonderful proportions and har- 
mony. No wonder the Kaiser longed to make a triumphal 
entry into it with his picked regiments in parade uniform, 
and as he was denied that privilege, what more natural, for 
a man of German " Kultur," than to endeavor to destroy it. 

About eight miles out of Nancy we saw the immense back 
of a cathedral with two unusual, semi-Oriental spires arising 
out of the approaching town. It was St. Nicholas-du-Port, 
and I am ashamed to say that I had never even heard of it 
before. The church is immense and very unusual in design 
and ornamentation and very beautiful. We lost half an hour 
looking at it, and I bought several books about it which I 
hope to read if ever I can catch up with myself. In the mean- 

OS] 



time, I lift my hat to Lorraine and the marvellous archi- 
tecture of its past, and I pray the " Bon Dieu," as the little 
concierge in the cathedral said she did every day, to help 
keep the Prussians away and spare these glorious monu- 
ments from their savagery. 

So good-bye to St. Nicholas-du-Port ; and on and on we 
go between the eternal lines of flowering trees which border 
and perfume every French road in the springtime ; past fields 
smiling with spring verdure, dotted everywhere with wooden 
crosses marking soldiers' graves, — for we are now entering 
the region where the Germans were in the beginning of the 
war. At Luneville the walls are pitted with the traces of 
balls and shrapnel, and as we go into the heart of the city 
we find streets and streets obliterated by the German torch. 
" Burned without reason," a French officer, whom we inter- 
viewed, asserted, but this is nothing compared with the 
cruel devastation we are going to see in the next towns. 

At Gerbeviller, about twelve miles farther on, where last 
spring some two thousand people lived in peace and comfort, 
not a single house remains. They were not frame houses 
like those in an American town, which might easily catch 
fire one from another; they were stone buildings, and they 
were deliberately set fire to, one after another, by these 
modern Huns and Vandals. I do not believe that there are 
twenty-five people left in the town. We saw a few old women 
and a few children wandering around among the ruins ; the 
two churches, the chateau on the edge of the town, hundreds 
of homes and little shops — everything in ruins. 

The next town we came to was Magniers, and this like- 
wise was a ruin, except for one or two buildings. I stopped 
to take a photograph when an officer stepped out of one of the 
few remaining houses, and, seeing that I was an American, 
invited us to lunch with him and his staff. We had a good 
lunch, with good and entertaining talk, and another warm- 

[106] 



hearted toast to the great sister republic across the seas, 
and nearly two hours had passed before we were once more 
on our way. I shall long remember the warm hospitality 
of Colonel Danglade, of the Third Hussars. 

Then about forty miles farther, and we reached St. 
Maurice-sur-Moselle, where our first section is located, the 
one that is working in Alsace. Just as we were coming into 
the town I saw Charley Codman and Paul Watson, two 
Harvard boys who are with this section. They were just 
starting to climb the neighboring mountain, Ballon d'Alsace, 
to see the sunset and begged me to come along; so, without 
waiting to see the others, or realizing the task that lay 
ahead, I took off my coat, rolled up my sleeves, and we set 
off on a long, hard climb. The latter part was over melting 
snow and rather difficult, but we reached the summit just 
before the sun had disappeared beyond a great panorama of 
mountain ranges. At the top of the mountain some one 
has erected an equestrian figure of Jeanne d 'Arc. The night 
had well closed in before we got back, and we had to pick 
our way carefully down the trails through the pine woods. 

In the little inn where the section has its meals, we found 
Dick Lawrence and Dallas McGrew and Lovering Hill and 
the other fellows, and we talked over their needs and prob- 
lems and swapped news of the war until bedtime. 

Hartmannsweilerkopf had been retaken by the Germans 
a week before and retaken by the French two nights ago 
with many losses and many wounded on both occasions, 
and our boys have been very busy. 

This is all I can write now. 



Neuilly-sur-Seine, May I, 1915. 

Yesterday morning we started out early from St. Maurice 
and motored across the pass and drove down into the valley 
of Alsace, now verdant and fragrant with the spring. The 
streets of the picturesque little Alsatian towns were thronged 
with the sturdy " chasseurs alpins " who have been doing such 
splendid fighting in the mountains roundabout, and on whom 
still heavier tasks are still to fall. We went as far as Thann, 
which is pretty badly mutilated by the shells that drop on 
it every day, and there the sentinels told us it would be 
dangerous to try to go farther. I bought some dolls dressed 
in Alsatian clothes for Helen and Polly in a little shop in 
Thann, and I sent a number of postals which the girl clerk 
took over to the mayor's office and had stamped with the 
old German and the new French seals. Let me know if you 
ever receive them. 

1 The trip has been a hard one. Yesterday we motored 
until midnight, — considerably over three hundred miles in 
one day, — and we reached Paris about noon to-day. 

Our boys in Dunkirk, it appears, have had a good deal of 
excitement this week. They have been working night and 
day in Belgium in the great battle around Ypres in which 
the Germans have been using asphyxiating gases, and on 
Wednesday and Thursday shells began dropping, without 
warning or any indication of their origin, upon Dunkirk 
itself. One of the fellows lost his nerve and returned to 
Neuilly to tell the story. They think now that these shells 
were fired by German guns located about twenty miles 
away. The Germans get their range by the aid of the avia- 
tors, and about thirty shells were dropped in the heart of 
the town, killing a good many civilians, women, and children. 



[108] 



XXXVI 

May 8, ipi 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I simply cannot write how I feel about the sinking of the 
Lusitania. I know that you must feel the same way. Words 
cannot characterize this latest of a long series of loathsome 
acts which for all Christendom and for generations must 
make the name "German" a term of odium and reproach. 
But words are insufficient. The German government seems 
indifferent to the contempt and indignation of the rest of 
the world. It must be forced to conform to the primitive 
dictates of civilization, if civilization is to endure. I hope 
with all that is in me that our country will join with the 
rest of the civilized world in vigorous action against the gov- 
ernment that has now added to its hideous record of crimes 
against other peoples the ruthless and wanton massacre of 
so many of our own fellow citizens. We who are rich and 
strong and safe must do our share in saving the future from 
a return to the Dark Ages, which the triumph of the 
Germano-Turkish powers would mean. 

I can't remember whether I sent you copies of these pho- 
tographs or not. I took them a month ago in Nieuport, La 
Panne, and Ypres or along the communicating roads. Since 
that time what remained of the picturesque old city of Ypres 
has probably been destroyed. In the picture of the Drapers' 
Hall which I took, you will see that the roof and windows 
were all gone and the walls shattered beyond repair. Since 
then the fighting has been terrific around Ypres, and this 
fine old structure is doubtless even more a ruin now than 
it was then. Our boys in Dunkirk have worked night and 
day during this fighting and have been constantly under 



shell fire, but luckily none of them has been even scratched. 
I have just received a fine tribute to their courage from 
General Putz, a copy of which I enclose. I can't help feeling 
a little regretful not to have been able to be with my old 
section during these great days. 

Tuesday, the nth, I start east again on another inspection 
trip. 

DETACHEMENT D'ARMEE Au QG. le 5 Mai, 1915. 

de BELGIQUE 



Etat-Major 

Le General Putz 

Commandant le detachement d'Armee de Belgique 

Ier Bureau — a Monsieur Andrew, Inspecteur du Service 

des Ambulances de l'Hopital Americain. 

Monsieur, — 

Mon attention a ete appelee sur les precieux services rendus 
au Detachement d'Armee de Belgique par la Section Sanitaire 
Automobile Americaine qui lui est attachee. 

Cette Section a du, en effet, concurremment avec la Section 
Anglaise, assurer l'evacuation d'Elverdinghe sur Poperinghe des 
nombreux militaires blesses au cours des recents combats. 

Malgre le bombardement d'Elverdinghe, des routes qui y 
accedent, et de l'Ambulance meme, cette evacuation s'est 
effectuee nuit et jour, sans interruption, et dans d'excellentes 
conditions de promptitude et de regularite. 

Je ne saurais trop louer le courage et le devouement dont a fait 
preuve le personnel de la Section, et je vous serais oblige de 
vouloir bien lui transmettre mes felicitations et mes remercie- 
ments pour l'effort physique considerable qu'il a si genereuse- 
ment consenti, et les signales services qu'il a rendus. 

Veuillez agreer, Monsieur, l'expression de ma consideration 
tres distinguee. 

(Signe) Putz. 



XXXVII 

Letter published in the Boston Herald, Thursday, June 3, igis 

OUT OF THE DEPTHS 

On the stationery of the American Ambulance of Paris, Mr. 
A. Piatt Andrew of East Gloucester, widely known in connection 
with the currency reform campaign, and later as an opponent 
of Captain Augustus P. Gardner for the congressional nomina- 
tion last fall, writes a letter to which we give prominence in 
another column. In an accompanying note, he says that he 
could not help writing it, that it expresses what he "feels in 
the very depths." Such a letter from an earnest and high- 
minded man deserves careful reading. We commend Dr. 
Andrew's letter, in spite of our strong disinclination to inflame 
public feeling at this particular time, when the President's 
course in steering the ship of state can be none too easy. We 
have deemed it a duty to urge on our readers some degree of 
calmness and patience, even though we have never been willing 
to say any word which would be interpreted as palliative of 
Germany's offence in the destruction of the Lusitania, or as 
an indicative of any lack of support of President Wilson in 
whatever course he may take to maintain the rights of neutrals 
on the seas. 

FROM AN AMERICAN ON THE BATTLE-LINES 
To the Editor of the Herald: 

We Americans of to-day are onlookers upon one of the 
greatest struggles in the world's history, and a struggle as 
clear and crucial in its issue for the future of the earth on 
which we live as any since history began. We observe a 
mediaeval monarchy in which the people have practically no 
share in the government, whose representatives respect no 
right except that of might, who regard no pledge or promise 
which interferes with their interest as binding, and who 
sanction the most hideous and inhuman brutalities, attempt- 
ing to impose itself upon peaceful and unoffending countries. 

C"0 



We have sat silently by while clause after clause of treaties, 
of which we, too, were signatories, were treated as scrap- 
paper. We have sat silently by while an utterly unoffending 
nation was devastated, its towns and cities and peaceful 
farms pillaged and burned, its universities and libraries and 
churches destroyed. We have sat silently by while 7,000,000 
people of this innocent nation were driven from their homes. 
We have sat silently by while the mediaeval monarchy 
ground monstrous tributes from those who were left. We 
have sat silently by while officers of this mediaeval monarchy 
allowed their cohorts, drunk with stolen wine, to rape and 
murder and commit crimes of cannibals and beasts. We 
have sat silently by while the hordes of this mediaeval 
monarchy swept on through a sister republic, burning every- 
thing before them, farmhouses, villages, towns, and cities, 
leaving in their trail scores and scores of cities, and scores of 
thousands of homes, transformed into chimneys and ashes 
like Messina or San Francisco after nature's cruel upheavals. 
We have sat silently by while the world's most wonderful 
architectural heritages were deliberately and persistently 
destroyed by incendiary bombs and torches. We have sat 
silently by while women and children in sleeping towns and 
villages, uninvested and unfortified and far removed from 
the contending armies, were assassinated without warning 
by representatives of this mediaeval monarchy. We have 
sat silently by while other representatives of this mediaeval 
monarchy sent unoffending fishermen and sailors and crews 
of neutral merchantmen, without warning, to the bottom of 
the sea. We have sat silently by while the best that civiliza- 
tion has accumulated in international laws and treaties and 
humane customs during a thousand years were swept away 
by a species of hereditary and undemocratic government 
that our ancestors more than a century ago contended 
against through seven years of desperate war. We have sat 



as silent, unmoved witnesses while such a government ruth- 
lessly pursued its course and turned civilization back into 
the "Kultur" of the eleventh century. 

We have expressed no opinion, have taken no side, our 
President has exhorted us to remain neutral and indifferent 
as to what might prevail. As representatives of a great de- 
mocracy we have voiced no protests, we have offered no 
help, we have not even expressed sympathy with that great 
peace-loving sister democracy whose ancestors fought with 
us and for us during our seven years' struggle for existence, 
who spent for us thousands and thousands of lives and hun- 
dreds of millions of dollars, and to whom we owe our very 
entity and independence. Not only that, but in the face of 
all the hideous and revolting facts of the past ten months 
which are known to every one, our President, after the sink- 
ing of the Lusitania, publicly and officially proclaimed "the 
humane and enlightened attitude hitherto assumed by the 
Imperial German Government in matters of international 
right" and "the German views and the German influence in 
the field of international obligations as always engaged upon 
the side of justice and humanity." 

We have behaved as if our souls were dead and the ideals 
of the founders of our government were extinct. We have 
behaved like a soft-bodied man, who, seeing a ruffian beat- 
ing and kicking and spitting in the face of a woman on 
the street, looks on for hours with indifference, says that is 
not his business, shows no resentment until a misdirected 
blow accidentally strikes him in a tender spot, and then 
explains his previous inaction on the ground that he had 
not hitherto observed that the ruffian was not "humane," 
"enlightened," and "engaged on the side of justice." 

Is America no longer a country of ideals beyond success 
in business and the accumulation of material wealth and 
comfort? Is America no longer capable of making sacrifice 



except to mammon? Is the generous spirit which animated 
the founders of our government, and which a century and 
more ago inspired the admiration of the world, extinct ? Do 
we no longer stand for anything except big railroads, great 
steel plants, kerosene, beef, wheat, and cotton ? As a nation 
do we represent nothing which makes us worthy of an endur- 
ing future? Are we headed on the road to Carthage and 
Rome? 

A. Piatt Andrew. 

Paris, May 19, 191 5. 



XXXVIII 

Neuilly-sur-Seine, May 21, 191$. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Week follows week now with great speed, and I am so 
busy and there is so much that is worth doing and must be 
done that there is no time left to write. 

Last week I went up again to the east, taking with me 
Dr. du Bouchet, a delightful companion, the head surgeon 
of the hospital. Summer is really here and the landscape has 
changed much since my early trips. The trees along the 
valley of the Marne, which we generally follow on our trips 
east, are now in full verdure and the branches and trunks 
torn by shells are not as evident as they were. The little 
wooden crosses in the fields marking soldiers' graves are 
often concealed by grass and the coming crops. The pencil 
inscriptions on the boards, telling that such and such a 
number fell here on "the field of honor," are disappearing 
also. 

At Pont-a-Mousson, where we spent the first night, I 
could hear the shells whistling overhead all night long, our 
shells and theirs, but none struck in the town. The German 
trenches are only about half a mile away, but for some reason 
the Germans prefer to send their shells on beyond to towns 
four or five miles distant. Perhaps they hope sometime to 
occupy Pont-a-Mousson and are keeping it for expected 
future use. At any rate, they only drop in two or three 
shells in the course of every twenty-four hours and let it go 
at that. 

I went up again into the Bois-le-Pretre, in which "our" 
army has now practically taken possession of all the trenches 
clear through to the other side. They are fighting there 
every night, but the men seem cheerful and gay, and as we 



went up the slope of the hill we passed hundreds coming 
back from the trenches with their helmets and sacks covered 
with bouquets of lilies-of-the-valley, and other wild flowers, 
picked in the wood. I lunched at Colonel Etienne's head- 
quarters with a crowd of officers, all of whom were lavish in 
their tributes to the work of our men, and then we pushed 
on again through beautiful landscapes to Nancy, past the 
picturesque old cathedral town of St. Nicholas-du-Port, and 
then through the devastated towns and cities of Lorraine, 
spending the night in Remiremont. All through this region 
the figures of Jeanne d 'Arc were wreathed with flowers and 
draped with flags, as it was near the date of her anniversary 
and Lorraine was her birthplace. 

Next day, Thursday, the 13th, we ran down to Alsace and 
to Thann, passing many pretty processions of boys and girls 
dressed in white, preparing for their first communion, usually 
accompanied by their mothers and priests carrying decorated 
candles and brilliant banners. 

On the way back we passed through Sermaize, Pargny, 
Etrepy, and several other towns that were destroyed by the 
Germans on their barbarous invasion last September. They 
are sad beyond words, nothing but chimneys as far as you 
can see. In Sermaize I saw the ruins of a beautiful church 
bearing over the door the date 1083, which had been de- 
liberately burned by the Germans. In the ruins of this roof- 
less church stood a figure of Jeanne d'Arc, her flag shot 
from her hands, which still grasped the staff. The figure was 
almost miraculously devoid of scratches, and about its base 
French soldiers had placed several empty German shell 
cases filled with fresh flowers. 

At Nancy I bought two dolls for Helen and Polly, dressed 
in the old costumes of Lorraine, and in Thann, where shells 
are crashing in every day, I recently bought two dolls deco- 
rated by a local milliner in the picturesque black coiffure 

C"*3 



and gay dress of Alsace. I will send them in a day or two. 
Tell the children to keep them always because of the time 
and place from which they come, Nancy and Thann, in 
Lorraine and Alsace, in May of the year of the great war, 

1915. 
In Bois-le-Pretre, I picked up a German cap. Perhaps the 

soldier who wore it was buried among the neighboring trees, 
perhaps he is a prisoner. I am sending it to you to keep for 
me. Please place it over BemstorfFs picture in my library, 
covering his face. 

I am leaving this morning for Dunkirk in the north for a 
couple of days to see our boys, who must have had much 
to do these last weeks in the terrible fighting around Ypres. 
We have twenty ambulances up there now, and most of 
them are stationed near Poperinghe in the thick of it all. 
They tell me the Canadians fought like heroes night after 
night and day after day with bayonets and swords and knives 
in hand-to-hand contests. How many unnamed heroes there 
are of whom history will never know what they did ! 

Things are going well now everywhere. Italy is presently 
coming in. Roumania, we hope, will follow. I feel it more 
deeply than I have ever felt anything that my country, 
great and powerful as she is, and supposedly interested in 
the survival of justice and right, should have remained an 
unmoved onlooker in the great struggle. There never was 
a clearer issue between right and wrong. Never in our life- 
time, or in our country's history, has there been an issue so 
momentous, or one in which, considering our history and 
past ideals, we ought to have been so much concerned, but 
. . . what can we hope for? How can our country be ex- 
pected to recognize its obligations or its opportunities, with 
its President, according to report, absorbed in flirtations, 
and Bryan, of the vacuous mind, in charge of our foreign 
affairs ? 



XXXIX 

Hotel Chapeau Rouge, Dunkirk, 

Friday, May 21, 1915. 

Dear Mother and Father: 

It was a beautiful drive from Paris to-day, about two 
hundred miles through a landscape that has become much 
embellished since last I saw it, a month or so ago. Every- 
thing is rampantly green, except the flowering white and 
purple wistaria which hangs over doorways, and the high 
white stuccoed walls and the red-tiled roofs of the villages. 
I have worked hard these last days, and was glad to slip into 
a comfortable position in the motor and watch the world 
roll by, and dream. France is too gentle, too peaceful, too 
civilized, too beautiful to be at war. This I kept thinking 
as we swept on. 

We made the trip without incident, stopping for lunch at 
Beauvais, where a month ago our boys, who are now so 
busy at Pont-a-Mousson, were fretting day after day in 
comparative idleness. When I saw them last week up there, 
all of the other ambulances had been called back and they 
alone were performing the service of transporting the 
wounded for the region centring around Pont-a-Mousson 
and Bois-le-Pretre, and the work was so arduous, extensive, 
and important that we sent them another ten machines this 
week. Beauvais no longer has any particular interest for me 
except for a single French official, Captain Neumoger, whose 
office is there and whom it is a pleasant duty from time to 
time to see. 

At Montreuil we passed through the usual crowds of 
khaki-uniformed "Tommies." In Boulogne we passed many 
picturesque Hindus, now dressed in khaki-colored turbans 
and khaki coats and breeches, — a curious uniform, half 

C"83 



British and half Oriental. Some of their officers looked quite 
magnificent, great tall fellows with large khaki turbans and 
smart English walking-coats, and carrying canes like swank- 
ing British officers. Near Calais, where we ran again into the 
Belgian sector, a young Belgian soldier asked us to give 
him a lift, which we are always glad to do for any soldier, 
but especially a Belgian. He was an attractive-looking young 
fellow about twenty-one, and he told us that his home was 
in Antwerp and that his mother lived there still, but not a 
word had he been able to hear from her since the German 
invasion of last August. " I have just got back my hundred 
and third letter," he said. He had sent the letters by way 
of England, but they had been returned a hundred and 
three times without reaching Belgium. So I told him to give 
me a letter to his mother and I would try and get it through 
by means of our Embassy. 

i Dunkirk we reached just before dark, in time to see its 
desolate streets, most of its windows broken or boarded over, 
most stores and restaurants closed, most houses abandoned, 
and here and there groups of houses in ruins. We found our 
hotel open, and here I found my old friend, the Comtesse 
Benoist d 'Azy, who has remained through all the bombard- 
ments and still goes every day to the railway-station hospital, 
although the station has been the particular goal of the 
German shells. We had a good talk, and to-morrow I shall 
look up our men who have moved out into the suburbs. 

Good-night. 

Saturday, May 22, Dunkirk. 

Friday night we spent quietly enough in the hotel at 
Dunkirk. There were no shells, and in fact none had dropped 
in the town for a week. We heard many stories, however, 
of the recent bombardments. It seems incredible but the 
shells, which without warning began to drop in Dunkirk 
about a month ago and of which more than a hundred have 

Z"9l 



fallen in the intervening time, came from about thirty-six 
kilometres — more than twenty-two miles — away. They 
are as tall as a man, and even the steel cap, of which Colonel 
Morier showed me several, was so heavy that I could not 
lift it. Think of it, a projectile six feet high, and weighing 
at least a ton and a half, thrown twenty-two miles! The 
explosion of one of these projectiles is enough to destroy 
utterly two or three store buildings and contiguous houses. 
One heard no anticipatory sound, one could not hear the 
report of the departure of the shell twenty-two miles away, 
and since, when the shell reached its goal, its force was 
spent, there was not even a whir or a whistle ; but suddenly, 
out of the clear and silent sky, came a vast explosion, and 
houses and stores fell in and dust and smoke and fragments 
of stone and timber mounted into the air as in a volcanic 
eruption. People and wagons on the street were blown to 
atoms. One shell struck in the cemetery as an interment was 
taking place, and the coffin and nine or ten mourners, 
mostly women and children, were transformed into debris 
in the twinkling of an eye. Another struck on the street 
near the convent where we used to be billeted, and killed a 
group of children at play; nobody knew exactly how many, 
the fragments were so scattered. Little wonder that the 
people have deserted Dunkirk, and that the streets, which 
a month ago were gay with the uniforms of several nations, 
are now deserted and silent, and its homes tenantless. 

Our section of ambulances is divided now into two squads 
of ten each. Half the men and machines remain in Dunkirk 
doing the same good work as formerly at the station, in 
which however only one train now arrives per day. The men 
live in a comfortable villa at Malo, a summer resort suburb 
of Dunkirk on the shore. The other half are stationed at 
Poperinghe, in Belgium, not far from Ypres, and we shall 
run down there and see them to-day. 

C 120.3 



Neuilly-sur-Seine, 

Sunday night, May 23. 

Poperinghe is a Flemish town, perhaps twenty or twenty- 
five miles from Dunkirk, and the roads leading to it are 
thronged with convoys and soldiers, so we had to run slowly, 
but we ran through a pretty country, with great windmills 
and little thatched-roofed cottages, surrounded by bright- 
colored gardens and highly cultivated farms. 

On the way we passed a procession of a hundred or more 
German prisoners, and with the permission of the French 
cuirassier who rode at their head, I took several photo- 
graphs of them as they trudged by. The cuirassier was 
more than pleased to be snapped in such surroundings, and 
wheeled his horse into the foreground so as almost to obscure 
the prisoners. 

Poperinghe is chock-a-block with soldiers, English and 
French. It is about three or four miles from Ypres and six 
or seven miles from the famous Yser Canal, about which 
Germany and the Allies have been fighting continuously and 
furiously for so many weeks. 

Our boys are stationed in a farmyard near the town. 
Some of them sleep on stretchers in a little room in the farm- 
house, others sleep in the straw in the loft of the barn. They 
take their meals in the brick-floored kitchen-living-room of 
the little farmhouse, surrounded by dirty babies, a dog, 
several hens, and a goat — an environment which suggests 
the pictures of Teniers and some of the Flemish painters of 
long ago. 

My old ambulance was here, and Campbell, who used to 
be my orderly, but who drives it now, insisted that I must 
drive it again, so just before dark we started out with me 
at the wheel. Practically all their work now is night work. 
They go pretty near to the front and would be exposed in 
the daytime to rifle fire as well as to the cannon fire of the 



enemy. We stopped at Elverdinghe, where our section was 
stationed a few weeks ago, but which has been torn by shells 
into crumbling ruins. 

Then, as darkness descended, we went on to the dressing- 
stations on the edge of the Yser Canal, — first to Zuydcote 
and then to Boesinghe. We had to crawl over the road 
without any lights, even oil lamps, and one has to watch 
carefully for the dark spots on the road, which are shell- 
holes, usually three or four feet deep, and at unexpected 
intervals and which would capsize your machine if you hap- 
pened to run into one. 

As we got closer to the Canal and the line, the din of the 
guns became greater and greater. It goes on incessantly 
day and night, and one gets so accustomed to it as not to 
notice it from a distance, where it sounds like the rumble of 
thunder, but as we approached, it grew louder and louder, 
with boom! crash! boom! It seemed like the night of the 
Fourth of July; cannon firecrackers seemed to be exploding 
everywhere, with packages of little crackers sputtering at 
intervals (the crackle of musketry). You were startled every 
now and then by a terrific explosion right near at hand, and 
were relieved to know that it was only a "departure" from 
one of our own concealed batteries. But perhaps a few 
seconds later you heard the whistling whir of a German 
shell as it passed on over your head to its destination, a mile 
or two back. Meanwhile, as far as you could see along the 
line of the trenches the sky was bright with rockets. In 
order to keep the enemy from charging across under cover 
of darkness, each side continuously sends up rockets which 
drop brilliant lights in the sky hung from small parachutes. 
They last for a minute or so and illumine the landscape 
with intense white light. I wish I could convey to you my 
impression of that scene — the dark night, the sky flashing 
with explosions of shrapnel, the line of rockets and glowing 



stars, the roar and din of the cannon incessant as the noise 
of a factory, every now and then a thick crackle of small 
arms, probably meaning that some one had been caught 
crawling out of his trench, or that a company was attempt- 
ing an attack. In the midst of it all, there were several claps 
of real thunder, but God's thunder was nothing as compared 
to man's. 

Eventually we reached the dressing-station, a Flemish 
farmhouse, whose interior was lighted by a single candle, and 
here were two men badly wounded, lying in the straw on 
the floor. We carried them out to our ambulance and then 
threaded our way back through the dark, shell-torn road to 
the tent hospital in Woesten, which is a halfway post, a 
" relai d'ambulance," on the route to the base hospital, where 
the more seriously wounded can be treated at once. We 
took our men into the tent, and as one of them had been 
shot in the breast he was immediately put on the table. It 
is the same story that has happened hundreds of thousands 
of times in the last ten months and I won't harrow you 
with the details. The poor boy had already lost much blood, 
and before morning he had doubtless given his life for his 
country, dying without a friend or acquaintance near, lying 
on the ground in a dimly lighted tent in Belgium. 

We made other trips during the night to other "postes de 
secours," and at about two o'clock I got back to the farm 
near Poperinghe and crawled up in the barn loft and went 
to sleep in the sweet-smelling hay. 

Neuilly-sur-Seine, Wednesday, May 25. 

I am afraid you can't read these scrawls. I carry them 
about in my pocket and scribble as I get time. 

A letter has just come from you dated as late as May 14. 
I enjoyed the clippings about Roosevelt's libel suit and the 
Riggs Bank suit and the editorials from Western papers 

C I2 33 



about the Lusitania massacre. One gets very little news in 
the European papers about American domestic matters. 
Roosevelt's trouble and the Riggs Bank troubles do not 
bulk very large to the people over here, as compared with 
their own troubles, so I am only able to keep au courant 
with things at home through what you send. 

We have a new ally in Italy, and the Italian flag has been 
added everywhere to the groups of allied flags displayed on 
the fronts of buildings in Paris. We should all be proud and 
happy to see our Stars and Stripes along with the rest. It 
seems craven and ignoble that we are not lending our little 
aid in this great struggle. 

"'T is man's perdition to be safe 

When for the truth he ought to die." 

Yesterday I came across this hideous bit of travesty: — 

"Too proud to fight, to right a wrong, 
Too wise to talk with wisdom, too mighty to be strong, 
Fail Columbia!" 

How can one be really happy here in the midst of such 
unflinching sacrifice and courage, realizing that through the 
weakness of a few men America has become vulnerable to 
such thrusts as this? 

I have read Church's "American Verdict on the War" 
which you sent and regard it as a powerful document. Would 
that every intelligent German could have a copy of it. 
They apparently know so little about the crimes their gov- 
ernment has committed and about the verdict of the rest 
of the world upon them. A letter came the other day from 
President Eliot, commenting sympathetically upon my lit- 
tle screed in the "Boston Herald" about France's part in 
the war. 

I also received the enclosed very kind commentary from 
my old friend, Ambassador Jusserand: — 



Ambassade de la Republique Franqaise aux fctats-Unis, 

Washington, le io Mai, 1915. 
My dear Mr. Andrew: 

Your charming and most interesting letter arrived yesterday, 
and must have crossed at mid-ocean one which I had written 
to you and which has gone to the bottom with the last victim 
of German barbarity, the unfortunate Lusitania. 

I expressed in it the great interest and feeling of gratitude 
with which I had read your note printed in the "Boston 
Herald" on April 28. It was very cheering to read your favor- 
able account of the stubborn defense we are making, and, thank 
Heaven! a little more than defense nowadays. I hope that the 
movement forward will soon be continued. The deeds of the 
"kultured" people ought to give to all liberal-minded men, 
and such are all our soldiers, a new impetus in their desire 
to wipe off the face of the earth not their nation, but their 
system. 

Don't think that such snapshots as you sent us were less 
interesting for us than for the tall, thin, handsome man who 
appears in them, and in whom I recognize with glee my former 
tennis partner, under what he calls the " ancien regime." These 
little bits of landscape which appear in them seem to us lovable. 
We wish it were possible for us to kiss the trees, the plants, the 
stones on the road. 

A pity you were not sent sooner and were not present in what 
must have been a very memorable occasion when, in the former 
sousprefecture of Thann, French rule was established again, 
a tribunal was instituted, and, for the first time after almost 
half a century, the sitting was inaugurated with these solemn 
words: "Au nom du peuple francais." 

I cannot tell you how deeply grateful we are, with all our 
compatriots, for what Americans are doing, for their sympathy, 
their warm-heartedness, their help of every kind. May good 
luck attend you and all you undertake, and please tell all the 
Americans with whom you may be in contact what our feel- 
ing is and what an important thing they are doing in sealing 
again and in rejuvenating, so that it may live forever, the old 
friendship that was established in the days of the War of 
Independence. 

Believe me, my dear Mr. Andrew, with warm sympathy and 
gratitude, Very truly yours, 

Jusserand. 



XL 

Neuilly, June I, igi 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have spent a busy week here in Paris, mostly at my desk, 
and there is not as much as usual of interest to write about. 
Still, every day yields stirring impressions that I should like 
to record, if only time could be found. The experience that 
stands out clearest in my memory is the ceremony in the 
Sorbonne of last Saturday afternoon, when the great men of 
France, in the amphitheatre of the University, gave expres- 
sion to their gratitude to the people of the United States 
for what we have done for them during the war. The Presi- 
dent of the Republic was there, several members of the 
Cabinet, and a great many members of the Academy, 
writers and artists were gathered on the stage. A large 
French chorus had been trained to sing our American 
songs, and the ceremony opened, when, upon the arrival of 
the President and our Ambassador, the chorus rose and sang 
the "Star-Spangled Banner " and then the "Marseillaise." 
As always in France, everything was arranged with excellent 
taste. There were no uniformed soldiers, for this was a cere- 
mony of peace, having only to do with the peaceful services 
which a neutral country has been rendering. The great 
writers and artists of France had contributed two immense 
albums of tributes in verse and prose and paintings and 
drawings expressive of the homage of the French people to 
America, a form of voicing appreciation of which only 
Frenchmen would have dreamed. Gabriel Hanotaux, one of 
the most brilliant writers and historians, gave a brief, elo- 
quent, and heartfelt address which could not but bring a 
response from the heart of every Frenchman and American 
in the audience. 

I126I 



It was all beautifully and simply arranged, and yet it was 
one of the most humiliating and disappointing experiences 
I have ever had, for at the end of M. Hanotaux's carefully 
prepared address, the Ambassador of the United States had 
to respond, and accept on behalf of the American people the 
tributes which had been paid. Probably never since the time 
of Franklin has the American representative in France had 
such an opportunity to participate in as memorable an occa- 
sion or in so distinguished an assemblage. Certainly never 
in his life will the gentleman from Ohio have such a chance 
to utter one or two phrases that might be historic, and that 
would reverberate over the world. But alas! irrelevant and 
uninspired ideas were never expressed in more commonplace 
English, never have I heard a more rambling, long-winded, 
ill-prepared address. Here in France, in this prodigious period, 
in this touching setting, in the presence of most of the dis- 
tinguished men in France, he rambled on for three-quarters 
of an hour, as if he had been caught unprepared, even making 
jokes, — poor ones at that, — talking very much as he might 
at a Methodist Church "sociable" in Elyria, if his wife had 
been unexpectedly presented with a "kitchen shower." I 
doubt whether there was an American present, except per- 
haps the little wife, who did not want to hide his head for 
shame. It was not that one expected him to express the hope 
that France would win, or anything else that was unneutral, 
but one did expect him to use correct English and to speak 
with dignity, good taste, sympathy, and feeling. There were 
only two consoling thoughts. Very few of the audience 
could understand English, and knew how second-rate it all 
was — and the other very slightly consoling thought was 
that he did not really represent the United States, but the 
minority of American people, who, because of the contest 
between Taft and Roosevelt, happen to be in power. One 
felt this last consolation the more when on various occasions 

[127] 



in his speech, Mr. Sharp alluded with characteristic campaign 
stump-speech drawl to that "gra-a-a-te Amurican statesman, 
and Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan." 
I am off to-day again for the East. 

P.S. I telegraphed you yesterday that I have received your 
letters regularly. I get five or six a week and also many 
clippings, all of which bring great pleasure, even if I do not 
acknowledge them. 



XLI 

American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 

June 5, IQ15. 
Dear : 

From one or two letters that I have recently received it 
would appear that some disgruntled ex-member of our 
service has disseminated the notion that outside of Paris the 
American Ambulance has not been doing very serious work. 
It seems even to have been implied that the General Staff of 
the French army was not inclined to entrust to our sections 
service actually at the front. To one who knows the real 
situation, this is surprising and disappointing, because utterly 
contrary to the facts. 

The real facts, which you and the others in America who 
are working for the Ambulance should know, are these : that 
every one of our field sections, without exception, is working 
as far forward as the most advanced French sections con- 
ducted by enlisted soldiers, and that some of our sections 
because of the peculiar availability of our cars, and the un- 
usual devotion and courage of our men, are working nearer 
the actual battle-line than even the French cars. All this is 
attested by numerous letters from French generals and other 
officials, as, for instance, General Putz and General Le Boc, 
and by the request which has been made by the General 
Staff that we provide additional sections of twenty cars each, 
as rapidly as we can. 

It may be of interest to you to know somewhat more 
specifically the character of the work being done by some of 
our field sections. The section in the north, which, for con- 
venience, we have called the Dunkirk section, is now divided 
into two parts with ten ambulances in each. One part is sta- 

[129] 



tioned at the railway station in Dunkirk, where it serves 
the evacuation hospital, located in the freight house. Our 
men carry wounded from this evacuation hospital to more 
than a score of hospitals in Dunkirk, Malo, Bergues, Bour- 
bourg, Gravelines, Zuydcote and other towns, and they also 
bring back the convalescents from these hospitals to the 
trains which carry them to hospitals and resting-places in 
the interior of France. As you know, Dunkirk has been 
bombarded by the heaviest artillery during the last month. 
Shells as tall as a man and seventeen inches in diameter have 
dropped into Dunkirk from batteries located thirty-eight 
kilometres distant. They dropped without any preliminary 
warning and their explosion utterly annihilates everything 
within range. During these bombardments our men have 
rendered great service in picking up the killed and wounded 
on the streets. Fortunately, none of our men or machines 
have suffered any injury, but this work has been carried on 
in the midst of very real danger. 

The other part of our northern section is stationed at 
Poperinghe, where the men live and eat in a little Flemish 
farmhouse just outside the town. Some of the men sleep in 
the straw in a barn loft and the rest sleep on stretchers in a 
small room in which all the men also eat. One man goes 
back with a machine each day to Dunkirk, and is replaced 
by a man from Dunkirk, who brings out another machine 
with meat already cooked and other supplies. Thus the per- 
sonnel changes every ten days, and the men who have been 
working about Poperinghe are able to live more comfortably 
for ten days at Malo, a seaside resort near Dunkirk, where 
they are billeted, and while there they are able to work under 
more favorable conditions upon their machines. The men at 
Poperinghe have very little to do in the daytime, but at 
night, without phares or oil lamps, they set out after dark 
over rough pavements, in many cases badly torn by shells, 



and creep along some seven or eight miles on the road to 
Woesten, where is located the tent hospital ("relai d'ambu- 
lance")> called the Ambulance Marocaine. Formerly, they 
went to Elverdinghe, somewhat nearer Ypres, but during the 
last three or four weeks Elverdinghe has been virtually de- 
stroyed by shells, and the chateau which served as a hospital 
was hit a number of times and had to be evacuated. From 
the relay-tent hospital in Woesten they get their orders for 
the various "postes de secours" along the Yser Canal, and 
so the ambulances move along in groups of two or three to 
Boesinghe, Zuydcote, and other villages where in little 
Flemish farmhouses are located the dressing-stations. 

The wounded are brought here directly from the trenches 
or roads on which they have fallen and are carried back from 
these primitive stations to the tent hospital in Woesten. 
Our men often make several trips during the night. They 
are sometimes in the very midst of a deafening thunder of 
cannon fire, and crackling musketry, and rockets and fusees 
from the French and German trenches, one fourth of a mile 
away, illumine the night as for a holiday celebration. 

We have, as you know, two sections in the east, one in 
Alsace and one on the frontier of Lorraine. The section 
working in Alsace is stationed at St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, a 
clean little village in the Vosges, about three or four miles 
this side of the former frontier and surrounded by lofty 
mountains. From here, our cars go each day up over the 
pass and through the tunnel, which leads into what, a year 
ago, was German territory, and then, down a zigzag road 
through a series of picturesque little towns to various hos- 
pitals at Moosch, St. Amarin, and Kruth, where the wounded 
arrive in hand-carts or on mule-back, from the surrounding 
heights, Hartmannsweilerkopf and Guebweiler, often after 
trips of seven, eight or ten hours, through trenches and 
mountain paths, in regions where there are no roads. 

[130 



The following account from one of our men in this section 
gives a good idea of the daily work: — 

The service of Section Z, which is the military designation 
of the section attached to the army of the Vosges, is the fetch- 
ing of wounded from the evacuation hospitals in the recap- 
tured province of Alsace to the rail-head hospitals on the French 
side over a picturesque and difficult pass. The drivers are sub- 
ject to the same discipline as that governing the soldiers, eat 
the regular army ration that is issued daily, and are billeted on 
the townspeople. Every morning at half-past six some of our 
cars go over the pass and report for duty at the main evacua- 
tion hospital. This place is in a valley, just behind the high 
summits commanding the valley of the upper Rhine, where the 
fiercest fighting in the east has taken place and is still going 
on. The sound of artillery fighting echoes almost continuously 
from the guns in Hartmannsweilerkopf, for which, as the 
papers have daily stated, the contest is unremitting, the French 
holding and the Germans attacking. The majority of our 
wounded come from this battle-front. They are brought down 
on man and mule-back, the journey often taking a whole day. 
At the entrenched line, of course, they receive first aid and the 
attention of the battalion surgeons. 

The cars are all capable of carrying three stretcher cases and 
one seated beside the driver, or four seated, and the experience 
has been that the unique spring suspension and light body 
construction make our cars the most comfortable for the 
wounded of all the types in service. 

The daily routine includes an afternoon service of our cars 
to the same hospitals. After a vigorous action, especially on the 
offensive, our whole section may be rolling back and forth over 
the pass through the night. Usually this work is from another 
evacuation hospital to the north established in a big German 
cotton-mill, where the wounded straggle in all night and wait 
their turns with the busy, brown-bloused surgeons, in a big 
storeroom lighted by acetylene light. 

The donors of the ambulances would be quite satisfied of the 
high value of their gifts if they could once witness the courage 
and gayety under torture of the magnificent French soldiers. 
Every one of them has thought the question out for himself, 
and every one of them is sure that he, personally, is serving the 
cause of justice in a contest of civilization against barbarism, 
and the reasoning has not been based on assumed or hypo- 



thetical premises, but on the grimmest of horrible facts. When 
they are set down at the end of their hour's ride in the American 
ambulances, almost without exception they make some cheer- 
ful expression of gratitude, the accumulation of which would 
mean much to the givers of the cars. 

So much for the work of our section which the French 
Government has sent into the romantic region of the regained 
province. The other section in the east consists of twenty 
ambulances with a supply-car and a pilot car, as in the north, 
and which we expect will be the standard size of all our 
future sections. It is located not more than five or six miles 
from the German frontier, about fifteen or twenty miles 
north of Nancy. These American ambulances are the only 
ambulances in a region where there are continual engage- 
ments. The men live in barracks and private houses in the 
town of Pont-a-Mousson, which has been bombarded no less 
than a hundred times and which is located no more than eight 
or nine hundred metres from the German trenches. Our 
machines run up to the dressing-stations on the edge of the 
Bois-le-Pretre and carry the wounded soldiers from these 
dressing-stations to the hospitals in half a dozen towns 
five or ten miles back from the lines. Our men run for miles 
within range of the German shells, and much of the time 
within sight of the German lines. 

The following excerpt from a letter just received from one 
of our men gives a good idea of the work of this section: — 

The final proof of confidence is, of course, in the work en- 
trusted to us. This includes going out at night to Montauville 
and Clos Bois, stations behind the trenches, to bring in wounded 
who have received first aid, often a dangerous service, the whole 
district being under fire. It is interesting to note the compara- 
tive indifference of the people to shell fire. When the sound is 
heard of the approaching missile, some — not many — draw 
into doorways. Several groups of women to-day stood exposed, 
watching the explosions, and children continued their games. 
We had sat down to dinner before the firing ceased. Suddenly 



Jonin ran in and said two ambulances were needed down at 
the station. McConnel and Willis immediately volunteered and 
went down. They brought in three injured, of whom one died 
half an hour later. Firing recommenced at nine and continued 
on and off all night. There were no further casualties. 

A general description of day and night trips to Montauville 
may be of interest. On receipt of orders, the ambulance next 
in turn proceeds through the streets of Pont-a-Mousson (some- 
times in itself an exciting experience, the town being subject to 
intermittent shell fire at all times), crosses the railway, and 
threading its way through convoys of supply-wagons or bodies 
of troops, comes after three kilometres to Montauville. This is 
a village straggling along the road, with orchards, gardens, and 
little woods on either side; on the right hand, outward journey, 
can be seen the French third line of trenches crossing a hillside 
lopped with wood — the beginnings of Bois-le-Pretre. In all 
the houses soldiers are quartered. There are four "postes de 
secours" and from one of these the ambulance takes the 
wounded who are waiting. Clos Bois lies farther along the road, 
halfway up the hillside; there is no village, a farm-building 
serving as dressing-station. At night the same route is followed, 
but as no lights are carried it is sometimes not easy to keep to 
the road. We have often found it necessary for an orderly to 
accompany each driver on night trips for help in case of accident, 
and, on very dark nights, to go ahead and show the way. Dur- 
ing an attack this night work is an experience not to be for- 
gotten. The air is full of the growl of cannon reverberating 
between the hills, and from time to time a ghastly glare is thrown 
over the scene by phosphorus bombs held suspended by para- 
chutes which are sent up to uncover the enemy's bayonet 
charges. All the time the darkness is made visible by the flashes 
of guns and exploding shells. 

This section last week carried 1650 wounded, and in no 
week since their arrival in the east have they carried less 
than one thousand. 

Such, told briefly and in glimpses, are some of the services 
that our American youths are rendering to-day in France, 
and these services are deeply appreciated by the French 
people. I could cite letter after letter from distinguished 
French officials in confirmation of this. I will only quote 

C I 34] 



from one recently addressed to us by the president of an 
important committee of the Chamber of Deputies, after a 
visit by that committee to our several sections. It read as 
follows : — 

I have the honor to thank you in the name of the Commission 
on Public Hygiene for the enlightened and devoted service 
which the American Ambulance lavishes upon our wounded. 
In the sad hours through which we are passing it is particularly 
sweet for us to know that friendly hands are quick to help our 
brothers who are so courageously giving their blood in defence 
of our country. 

I hope the good people of Boston, who care for France 
and who want to express their sympathy with France in 
this calamitous period, will respond to your appeal and will 
help us to go on with and extend the work. 

A. Piatt Andrew. 



XLII 

Neuilly, June 23, 191 5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have begun many letters to you these last three weeks, 
only to be interrupted, and to allow so long an interval to 
elapse before resuming, that I have started and restarted 
again. Since I last wrote you, I have been again in the east, 
visited our sections at Pont-a-Mousson and the Vosges, had 
a wonderful mountain drive in Alsace over the Col du Bla- 
mont and the Col de la Grosse Pierre, not very far from 
which the French are now fighting their way toward Mun- 
ster; and since then I have been back again to the north and 
visited our section which was in Dunkirk, but which now is 
located at Coxyde, near Nieuport, and one night I went out 
with them to the dressing-stations around Nieuport, where 
we picked up wounded Zouaves and marines in the cellars, 
the only places still available around Nieuport for dressing- 
stations. 

Meanwhile, Buswell arrived, and my spare moments 
were absorbed with him. It seemed as if we were back in 
Gloucester, as he brought a thousand fresh impressions of 
Harry and Jack, and C. B. and Isabella and C. S. S. and 
the two generations of Patches. We lunched and dined to- 
gether, chatted, strolled, shopped, disputed, and were very 
happy, and almost forgot about the war for three or four 
days. It seemed like a real vacation, and when he went (I 
sent him to Pont-a-Mousson) I had to plunge again into 
details to forget how I missed him. 

But the war still goes on. One can forget it for a time in 
the bright sunshine of Paris — but not for long. Paris is 
neither gay nor sad. It is always beautiful beyond any other 
city in the world. The great avenues and boulevards seem 

[1363 



as thronged as usual with automobiles and the broad side- 
walks are thick with people. The public buildings and most 
large private buildings are bright with the grouped flags 
of the Allies. (I used to hope some day to see the Stars 
and Stripes where they ought to be among the other flags, 
but our days of chivalry and idealism — one might now 
add of national self-respect — seem gone.) One sees many 
variously colored uniforms of soldiers back for a few days 
from the front or of wounded soldiers here to recuperate, 
but there is no mock gayety as apparently is the case in 
Berlin and Vienna. There is no music in any of the restau- 
rants or cafes ; there are no public dances. People who dine 
out do not wear evening clothes, but go in their uniforms or 
day clothes. Only about half the theatres are open, and most 
plays have to do with Alsace or Lorraine, or the war, and the 
performances generally end with the "Marseillaise," every- 
body standing. At the opera, they often close the perform- 
ances with a patriotic scene, half pantomime, half song, 
with orchestral accompaniment, representing life in the 
trenches, with the bugle calls and a picture of the men sleep- 
ing on the ground, while one of them reads a letter from 
home by the light of the moon; then there is a night attack, 
and far away you hear the sputter of muskets, and finally 
a distant shout, growing louder and louder, and you know 
they are charging ; then a great cheer meaning success, and 
presently as the dawn breaks a hundred or more soldiers 
come scrambling out of the trenches and run into the fore- 
ground with their regimental flag, reporting victory. To end 
the scene Marthe Chenal, the great soprano of the opera, 
representing France, dressed in glittering helmet and cuirass, 
sings the "Marseillaise," making a great drama of it, and 
with the rousing soldiers' chorus and the booming drums and 
the trumpets, one feels ready to die the next minute for 
France. 



At the Francais, they give a sweet little play of Alsatian 
life called "L'ami Fritz," by Erckmann-Chatrian. It is a 
bucolic piece, appealing to the simplest sentiments, and is 
prettily "set." At the end comes a wedding party in an 
Alsatian "parlor," in which all of the great actors of the 
company are gathered in simple Alsatian clothes, and, one 
after another, each sings an Alsatian song, or recites an Al- 
satian poem, the great tragedian Mounet-Sully, and the 
great tragedienne, Segond-Weber, and all the rest. 

Another night, they give "Colette Baudoche," a drama- 
tization of the book of Maurice Barres, in which the scene 
is laid in Metz (in old Lorraine) about 19 10. The city has 
been invaded with Germans, the architecture vulgarized, the 
atmosphere of life grossened, but the old " dames de Metz," 
though often poor, hold aloof from the German newly rich. 
The story is of an old French family named Baudoche — 
the widowed mother who has to take boarders, and her 
daughter. They take a German high-school teacher to 
board, good-hearted and sentimental, but rather rough and 
lacking in intuition. He is very persistent in his attentions 
and finally persuades the daughter to agree to marry him, 
much to her mother's concealed distress. Then comes the 
day in September, when in the church in Metz they have 
the annual service in memory of the French soldiers who 
died for their country in 1870. The daughter goes to the 
service and is overcome by her love for France and con- 
cludes that she ought never to marry a German. She comes 
home and announces her decision. The German teacher is 
baffled and loses his temper. "One can never understand 
these French," he says. "In France, the conquest is never 
finished." And so the play ends, and everybody applauds, 
thinking of the battle of the Marne, and how near to and 
how far from a conquest the Germans then came. 

So much for the lighter side of life during the war. 

D38] 



Gradually the world is coming to recognize the glorious 
and valiant stand which France has made. Even the London 
"Times" is now printing a series of articles under the title 
of "The Achievement of France," to show the English people 
that it is the army of France which is bearing the brunt of the 
war and that England has done practically nothing on the 
land. To-day, after eleven months, her front does not extend 
over thirty-five miles, and even that front is not as far ad- 
vanced as it was six months ago. Eleven months of the war 
have passed, and she is not yet making any substantial con- 
tribution to it with her army. Her sector resembles a piece 
f pi e — ver y w ide in the rear, running all the way from 
Calais to Havre, but gradually contracting as it gets toward 
the firing line. Her total losses in dead, according to Mr. 
Asquith's statement of a few days ago, amount only to 
about fifty thousand, a considerable number, to be sure — 
but in France the dead are supposed to number close to 
three hundred and fifty thousand, and only the other day 
in the terrible fighting north of Arras, I am told that France 
lost nearly fifty thousand dead and wounded. So it is all 
along the five hundred miles of the French front. Night 
after night the cannonading and shooting go on, subterranean 
mines are exploded, French soldiers are fighting metre by 
metre through barbed wire, charging or resisting charges 
from trench to trench, with hand grenades, bayonets, and 
knives, in the woods, in the fields, through villages, around 
farmhouses, and even in the cellars. I come moderately close 
to it only at points. No human mind can picture the whole. 
But France, gentle, peace-loving country that she is, pays 
almost all of the cost with the lives and bodies of her sons. 

The English mentality is hard for an American to under- 
stand. Many Englishmen seem unable to think of the war 
in other terms than those of sport: war is the biggest sport- 
ing proposition, the biggest game hunting which the world 



has to offer. As I pass through the English lines, I not infre- 
quently see handsome English officers, trimly uniformed, on 
beautiful mounts, returning with their polo mallets from an 
afternoon game. Some of them have brought over their 
hounds and hunt across the fields. War does not seem to 
them a vitally serious proposition. Their country is not 
invaded ; in fact, it can't be invaded, their navy will see to 
that. It is true that the war must be won on the land, not 
on the sea. It is also true, as the London "Times" says, 
that "one is fighting for England just as truly in the Pas de 
Calais, as we should be on the soil of Kent." But one must 
not get excited about these damned Germans. Given time, 
they will tire themselves out. That seems to be the point 
of view of many Englishmen. 

French officers are very reticent in speaking of this. They 
naturally refuse to criticize their ally, and unless they know 
you very intimately, they pass over any remarks about the 
English attitude in silence, or with some such remark as, 
"Yes, the English mentality is different from ours"; or, 
"They seem to have great difficulty over there in getting suf- 
ficient ammunition"; or, "England is helping enormously on 
the sea"; or, "England is the great reserve upon which we 
can depend for the future." One whom I know very well, 
however, said the other day, with a smile, "Now that Italy 
has ceased to be neutral, we hope that Kitchener's army 
will follow her example." 

There is no question in any one's mind here as to the 
outcome of the war. German domination is inconceivable, 
and cost what it may, the war will be carried on until the 
German system is crushed. Remembering the German atti- 
tude toward treaties, the Allies will not allow of any compro- 
mise based on German pledges. Even though it take years, 
they are ready to push the war to an uncompromising end. 
The advantage which Germany had at the start through her 

[Ho] 



preparedness must sooner or later be offset by the effective 
organization which has been developed on our side, and, of 
course, the reserve resources of the Allies in men and sup- 
plies are indefinitely greater than those of the Germanic- 
Austro-Turkish alliance. 

But oh, the pity of it : — that America has so failed to 
recognize her opportunity. Never again will a tremendous 
issue be so clear as between right and wrong. Never again 
shall we have so vast a chance to help in making right pre- 
vail. It is for America, the one great disinterested judge 
among the nations of the world, to speak firmly for the sanc- 
tity of contracts between nations, and for the rights of small 
and unoffending countries to "life and liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness." It is for America to denounce officially 
sanctioned vandalism, arson, and murder, and to insist upon 
the elemental necessities of human civilization. The smaller 
neutral countries, especially the Balkan countries, are only 
waiting to follow her lead. If America did her duty, the 
Germans, even despite the bad attack of "big head" with 
which they are now so grossly afflicted, would be forced to 
recognize what the future has in store for them, that they are 
the enemies of the whole world which they cannot hope to 
vanquish, and that the eventual cost for them must become 
more staggering each day that the war is prolonged. It lies 
in the power of one man, and his name is Wilson, to bring 
this home to the German people, to expedite the ending of 
the most terrible calamity which has ever befallen the 
earth, and to prevent the sacrifice of additional hundreds of 
thousands of human lives. It is safely within the facts to 
say that upon Woodrow Wilson hangs the fate — the con- 
tinued life of millions of men. 

I am loath to believe that we, as a nation, have reached 
such a sophisticated point in our development that chivalry 
and sacrifice for others seem Utopian. I am loath to believe 



that we have become so well fed, sodden, and complacent 
that we would not willingly run any risks to help preserve 
justice, freedom, and civilization. I am unwilling to believe 
that as a people we have lost all national pride and self- 
respect and such respect for American citizenship as would 
make us resent the wholesale massacre of our countrymen, 
and the German Government's insolent evasions and delays 
in replying to our protests and the Kaiser's conferring on 
the murderer of more than a hundred American men, women, 
and children the highest honors in his command. The out- 
side world looks on with disappointment at what seems like 
America's degradation, but I will not admit that the Ameri- 
can people are responsible. They have been misguided, and 
to a great extent misrepresented, by the timid and faltering 
pacificism of Wilson and Bryan. 

P.S. Yes, I got the clippings of my "Herald" article, and 
am glad that you liked it. Dr. Powers's "reply" shows how 
little he knows about the way Germany is carrying on the 
war. He spoke of the great zeal shown by the individual 
German soldiers; but he probably does not know that the 
German infantry is forced to march in serried ranks in order 
to prevent them from "saving" themselves, and that cases 
are known where German artillerymen have been chained 
to their guns. In Germany, the government treats individ- 
uals as of no importance. They are like so many shells to 
be fired. Already, according to calculations based on offi- 
cial reports, the Germans and Austrians have lost nearly 
two million dead. This death list is not the result of zeal on 
the part of individual soldiers. It is the result of the ruth- 
less, mechanical, inhuman, though efficient, methods by 
which the German monarchy carries on the war. The 
Hohenzollern family must be kept in power, no matter how 
many plain German boys die to keep them there. I have 



often talked with German prisoners, and not infrequently 
have found they were glad to be free and out of the war, 
as soon as they had discovered that they would be treated 
humanely by the French. 

I write very little about the work which occupies most of 
my time. Not only do I have continually to visit our sec- 
tions, find out their needs and their troubles, interview the 
French officials of the armies to which they are attached 
and get their suggestions, try to correct mistakes and mis- 
understandings, etc., but back in Neuilly we have always 
new cars and new men to take care of, to get outfitted and 
to send out. We have now over one hundred and sixty cars 
on our rolls and more men than cars, and they are scattered 
all the way from the Channel to Alsace. To keep everything 
going smoothly means much attention to detail, but all of 
this would not be interesting to write about or to read. 



XLIII 

Neuilly, June 25, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I am leaving on Sunday, the 27th, for the east. A French 
lieutenant has been attached to me as an orderly whom I 
shall see for the first time on the eastern trip. 

No reply yet to America from Germany. How long will 
Wilson wait ? 

I am always well — and happy in what I am trying to 
do — though disconsolate about our government. 

I wish you were here — both of you. Love to you. 



CH4] 



XLIV 

St. Maurice-sur-Moselle, July 2, 1915- 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I am once more on the grand tour, and just turning home- 
wards to Paris after five days in "the field." We left Paris 
Sunday morning (June 27), after seeing our big Pierce-Arrow 
ambulance well on the way to Pont-a-Mousson and eight 
new Fords started on their way to St. Maurice. 

When I got down that morning to the automobile bureau 
in Paris from which I get my passes, the captain in charge 
there explained that he had received word from the G.Q.G. 
(grand quartier general — general headquarters — every- 
body in the army alludes to the different branches and bu- 
reaus alphabetically) that an officer was to be attached to 
me He apologized for not having a lieutenant available, but 
said he would give me a "marechal de logis," which is, more 
or less, the equivalent of a sergeant in English. I was not 
sure, by any means, that I was pleased to have a strange 
and 'possibly uncongenial person tied to me, but there was 
no way out, and presently a tall, distinguished-looking sol- 
dier who might have been a Russian general from his ap- 
pearance, presented himself in broken English as my future 
aide. I expressed appropriately polite satisfaction, and asked 
him his name. He murmured four or five syllables which I 
could not catch, and I offered him my card (one of those 
with several rows of titles, such as they use over here in 
France) and he presented me his. It read, "Le Due de 
Clermont-Tonnerre." So the duke now travels with us as 
my aide, and as he has proved congenial and companionable 
the arrangement works pleasantly enough. He looks after 
the passes, getting them viseed and prolonged and added 
to when necessary, and I am sure can save much bother, it 

Ci45J 



demonstrates one time the more, however, how utterly- 
democratic France is, that a duke belonging to one of the 
most famous families in France is naturally and willingly 
an under-officer in the French army. Such a thing would 
seldom happen, I suspect, in England. 

Our first real stop was at Pont-a-Mousson, where we ar- 
rived quite late Sunday night. I found Salisbury (who had 
been advised by telephone from a neighboring town of our 
approach) awaiting us in the barracks, which are the office, 
garage, dining-room, and general club of the section, and he 
took us to his own quarters to sleep. As I have told you 
before, our men are quartered all around the town in private 
houses, sometimes in houses that have been utterly deserted 
by their usual occupants, sometimes in houses where one or 
two servants remain. This time I found Salisbury quartered 
in a luxuriously furnished house with a perfectly appointed 
bedroom, and we slept in very comfortable canopied beds 
with electric lights at the head, and in the morning, when 
the curtains were drawn back from the windows by the 
servant, we looked down on an adorable garden bright with 
flowers, and lawns and gravel walks, and a pool and stream, 
with peacocks wandering about. In fact, I was awakened 
early that morning by the peacocks. The booming of our 
cannon which were being fired from a neighboring wood was 
not disturbing, for I have long since grown accustomed to 
it, as one does to thunder, but the crowing of the peacocks 
was an unaccustomed sound and waked me very early. It 
seemed curious within eight hundred yards of the German 
trenches to find so comfortable a place, with roses and honey- 
suckle and geraniums blossoming in the gardens as if they 
had never heard of the war. The owner of the house has 
been away for months, but the servants live on, and care for 
things as usual. 

All day Monday I was busy with arrangements for our 



section. I lunched with General Le Boc, who commands the 
division with which our section works, and who could not 
say enough about the efficient and devoted service which 
our men are rendering, and their courage in sharing so many 
of the hardships and dangers of the soldier's life. We had the 
usual champagne after lunch and toasts to the United States 
and the American volunteers and to France and the Victory. 
They all told me, over and over again, how dependable our 
men are, and how much they appreciate what we Americans 
are doing for them, and I had, as usual, to tell them how we 
regretted that we were represented at this great moment by 
men like Wilson and Bryan, and how we still hoped the time 
might come when the American Government would show 
officially that we as a people are not indifferent as to the 
outcome of this prodigious struggle. 

I stayed over at Pont-a-Mousson all of Tuesday, too, and 
Tuesday afternoon I had two interesting experiences. I 
drove up on one of the ambulances to Auberge St. Pierre, a 
dressing-station in a brick house on the edge of Bois-le- 
Pretre, perhaps five miles out of Pont-a-Mousson, and as at 
that moment there were no wounded ready to be taken back, 
and our batteries were firing from their shelters a quarter of 
a mile away, I walked down along the edge of the wood to 
where they were. They were firing four cannon (90-milli- 
metre guns) at a time at some unseen battery on the other 
side of the forest, and the reports of where the shells hit 
were being telephoned back from some of our trenches on 
the other side near where our shells were landing. "A little 
to the left," "So many yards back," etc., the man would 
call from the telephone, and the artillerymen would readjust 
their range. Then, when the guns were charged and the 
fuses inserted, the signal was given, and with a roar four 
more shells went whizzing off at imperceivable speed to an 
unseen destination two miles away. It is said to take about 

CU7l 



a thousand shells to kill a man; so if our fire was no more 
accurate than the German fire that afternoon, they had 
nothing to fear, for the Bodies' shells were not coming within 
half a mile of us. 

Later I visited an aviation field, not far away, where I 
had met some of the aviators, and here I had the second 

experience of the day. B , one of the best of the French 

aviators, invited me to fly with him. We went up to a 
height of something over three thousand feet, from which 
we had a wonderful panorama of the war zone thereabouts. 
One could see at least twenty or twenty-five miles in every 
direction. We sailed over L — ■ — and the surrounding forts, 
and then over some neighboring towns, with the earth below 
us like a carpet of finest pattern, of green and yellow, in 
which a ribbon of blue — the river — ran here and there like 
a slender serpent, with the trenches looking like broken nets 

of brownish string. B is a master in his profession, and 

there was no breeze ; so when we were somewhat over three 
thousand feet in the air, he shut off the motor, and we did 
spirals and glided and soared like the gulls. It would have 
been a gorgeous experience anywhere, but here was the ad- 
ditional interest of looking down on a famous battleground. 

On Wednesday (the 30th) we motored over to our tent 
hospital, which left Neuilly about a month ago, and which 
is now pitched at Pagny-sur-Meuse. This is an American 
field hospital purchased by American friends directly from 
the American Government. . . . 

I have arranged to send half of our cars over to Belleville 
in the region of Pont-a-Mousson to work in connection with 
Salisbury's section. 

Here in the Vosges Lawrence's section has undertaken a 
new and very important work. The region is mountainous, 
and no railroads cross or penetrate the mountains. The 
roads are narrow, steep, and crooked into sharp zigzags, and 

C *48:i 



as everything used in carrying on the war in Alsace has to 
be transported by wagons or by horses and mules, the roads 
are crowded. To transport one 220-shell it takes a horse, 
and the distance from Bussang, the nearest railway base to 
Mittlach, in the valley of the Fecht, is about twenty-four 
miles. So there is one eternal procession of horses, cannon, 
wagons, and soldiers going over the mountains. There are 
no hospitals on the other side, and the poor fellows wounded 
in the battles about Metzeral have had to be brought over 
the mountains on mule litters or in springless wagons, a trip 
occupying four or five hours, with only the most simple 
dressings. Our cars have, within the past two weeks, under- 
taken the task of running up over these mountains, and being 
light and powerful have successfully accomplished it, reduc- 
ing the trip for the wounded by three or four hours, and 
offering comparative comfort in a springed vehicle in place 
of what must have been a painful trip on mule-back or in a 
jolting lumber wagon. None of the French automobiles are 
able to make this trip, so we have really been rendering a 
precious and indispensable service in reducing suffering and 
saving lives. Last week we carried over a thousand wounded 
in this way, — most of the work being done at night, a great 
achievement, considering the steep grade and the roughness 
of the roads, and the necessity of making most of the jour- 
ney without lights of any kind while passing interminable 
convoys. 

On Thursday I went up over the mountains past Huss, 
the highest point of the crossing (four thousand feet above 
sea-level), from which the world opens up in a great pano- 
rama of mountain-tops, and then down again into the 
valley of the Fecht to Mittlach. While we were there some 
of the officers took us for a climb up one of the mountains 

called , from which we could survey the whole valley 

where the French have been fighting so furiously and so 

CH9] 



successfully during recent weeks. Every ridge is ferret-holed 
with trenches, and the once wooded tops are now only a 
tangle of splintered stumps. The wooded slope that we went 
up, however, was almost untouched, and was nested thick 
with dugouts and caverns filled with soldiers — a veritable 
ant-hill of "blue devils," as the "chasseurs alpins" are called. 
Never have I heard such grand music as the roar of the shells 
as they tore down the air line of the valley, echoing and 
reverberating through the forest, until after perhaps ten 
seconds one heard the distant explosions as they fell near the 
German batteries not far from Munster, about eight miles 
away. At one point we came on an opening in the wood, 
where there was an artillery observation post, a low hut 
concealed by pine branches above and about the sides. One 
of the officers invited us in, and with glasses we watched the 
shells arriving down the valley and ploughing up clouds of 
dust. They were being fired from batteries a mile or so away, 
but the observer in the post watching their arrival would 
give his orders by telephone, "A little to the right"; "Not 
quite so far but in the same direction," etc., etc. At one 
time we saw three despatch riders (Boches) on motor-cycles, 
flying down the road about three or four miles away, and our 
officers tried to hit them, and we could see the clouds of dust 
rising, first to the right, and then in front, and then behind 
them. We could not hit them, but I venture to say they 
were well scared. 

Down below us were the charred ruins of Metzeral, which 
the Germans had burned a few days before when forced to 
retreat. A mile or so beyond, a factory of some sort was 
going up in flame and smoke : the Germans were burning it 
lest it fall into French hands ; and down at the head of the 
sunny valley we could plainly see the spires of Munster's 
churches rising above the red-tiled roofs of the city. Perhaps 
when this reaches you, France will have gained it, but I fear 



if she has, it will be only a mass of ruins, for the Germans 
burn everything when they retire. 

On the top of the mountain we wandered for an hour among 
the trenches, which had only been deserted by the Germans 
a few days before — ditches six and seven feet deep running 
everywhere, and lined with subterranean rooms covered with 
straw and littered with German papers, empty bottles, rusty 
bayonets, old knapsacks, packages of letters, torn overcoats 
and underclothes, empty shell cases, etc. I picked up a 
number of touching letters and postal cards written in Ger- 
man, and one German diary, which had been begun on 
August i, 1914, the first day of mobilization, and which had 
been kept up until this June. The writer may be still living, 
but not improbably his body was one of the scores lying in 
unmarked graves. Everywhere, as one walked through the 
trenches, one saw white lime protruding from the fresh 
earth, only a foot or so deep, which French soldiers were 
pitching into the trenches to cover the German bodies, and 
now and then one hurried past a nauseating odor where some 
body was still partly exposed. 

It is curious how inured every one has become to death in 
its most brutal aspects. One thinks little more of passing 
a putrescent human body in a wood than one would, in ordi- 
nary times, of passing a dead dog or cat. It is unpleasant, 
and one hurries by, but one no longer has any sense of horror 
such as one would have had a year ago. Scenes that a year 
ago I could not have witnessed without being sick and feeling 
faint, I find myself now regarding with only a pathetic inter- 
est. They are inevitable, if melancholy, facts and so familiar 
as not to excite surprise. 

Here and there, deep in the wood, one came on graves of 
German soldiers who had died before the French captured 
the hill, and their graves had been marked by their comrades 
by crosses of fresh boards, covered with characteristically 



sentimental inscriptions, such as, "Unser unvergesslicher 
Freund," or, "Mag Ihr die Erde leicht sein," and at one 
place in the very heart of the wood was a fresh little burial- 
ground with a dozen or more crosses, some in German, some 
in French, where the soldiers of the two armies lay side by 
side. 

There is so much always to tell about and so little time, 
as one experience runs close on the heels of another. Time 

passed very quickly up on Hill . We climbed in and 

out of the trenches, past groups of soldiers sprinkling disin- 
fectants over human fragments, past batteries of our guns, 
past groups of singing " chasseurs," and always with the ac- 
companying music of our guns firing at intervals of a min- 
ute or so. We forgot all about lunch. Some soldiers gave us 
a few slices of bread, and that was enough. 

On the way back to St. Maurice, we watched a German 
bombardment of one of our mountain-tops, Hilsenfirst, I 
think it was called. One could see the flashes as the shrapnel 
burst in the air, and often four or five columns of dust when 
as many shells struck simultaneously, and then one would 
count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, before the re- 
ports of the explosions reached us. 

July 4, 1915- 
On the way back from the east, we took a route somewhat 
more to the south than usual, and as we were rolling along 
on Friday evening, de Clermont-Tonnerre remarked that if 
I were willing to run a few miles off our course, he would be 
grateful, because he could see one of his houses that he had 
not seen since the mobilization, nearly a year ago, and that 
we could spend the night there, which we decided to do. 

So about dusk we rolled through a pretty French town 
called Ancy-le-Franc, and then through heavy iron gates 
into a park bordered by century-old trees, and came on a 



tremendous thick-walled chateau of the time of Louis XIV. 
Only a caretaker and his family lived in it, and the silence 
of its courtyard in the twilight and of the long alleys of trees 
that led away from it down mysterious, dreamlike vistas, 
contrasted sharply with what we had been experiencing the 
day before. We went through one room after another, with 
fine old fireplaces and heavy-beamed ceilings like those 
of Fenway Court, and in the candlelight we could see the 
pictures on the walls of Francois Premier, and Diane de 
Poitiers, and the duke's ancestors of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries who used to live there, the Clermonts, 
Tonnerres, Noailles, and other famous old names of pre- 
Republican France. The walls were fully ten or twelve feet 
thick, and there were everywhere panels in the walls 
which could be opened, and through which we passed into 
other rooms or into staircases. There was a lovely chapel 
with a balcony, and a room for the archives of the family, 
the walls of which were literally panelled with the crests 
of the different branches. 

We had a mighty good dinner in a large tapestried room 
lighted only by candles, and the duke offered us some of his 
favorite wines. That night I slept in a damask-hung bed in 
a vaulted room, and from its walls looked down on me the 
portraits of men in armor and beautiful women, who three 
centuries or more ago had walked and laughed and loved and 
suffered within these same walls. Before I blew out the 
candle, I must admit that I wondered which of the panels in 
the walls were entrances from unseen passages, and what I 
would do if the wall opened during the night and some 
wraith walked across the room. But nothing happened. 
The only sounds were of the tinkling bells in the old clock 
on the roof of the chateau, and I slept as I had not slept 
for months. 

In the morning, as I opened my window, I looked out on 

C I 53H 



a decorative canal running down throm* * u a 

bordered lawn to an arrifir^liT , g br0ad tree " 

wii to an artificial lake, and in the centre nf +u 
lake and at the h^A r^f +u , centre of the 

covered villa of the time of Lo'uis ^ Tw as 5£^E 

t' go a t n a r h a e pl r la ; e of one of the d "S* 

we got back here Saturday afternoon and I fonnH H, 
Dav»on and his boy Trnbee waiting for me a the ho V T 
and wanting me to dine with them P ' ta '' 



XLV 

Neuilly, July 5, 79/5. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Yesterday, we celebrated the "Glorious Fourth," but alas, 
I must admit that I felt there was but little glory for us 
Americans to celebrate. The United States have had a great 
past, — they are destined, I feel confident, to have a great 
future, — but for the present I feel only a haunting sense of 
humiliation and regret. The only glory about the Fourth 
for me is the glory of France fighting the world's battles 
with indomitable courage and silent determination and with- 
out a murmur of complaint, although not properly sup- 
ported by any of her allies. In all the wonderful history 
of this great nation, she has never given more convincing 
evidence of her real greatness. 

In the morning we all went out to the grave of Lafayette. 
There was a group of our American ambulance volunteers 
in their khaki uniforms and a group of American volunteer 
soldiers from the Foreign Legion in the blue uniforms of 
France. With the French and American flags we marched 
through the cemetery to the tomb of the great Frenchman 
who spent so many years in the service of the United States 
during the grim years of our struggle for freedom. Here we 
were, — a little group of Americans, — trying in our turn 
to do our little for France in her desperate effort to throw 
off the yoke of her aggressors. But our Ambassador was 
our spokesman, and he spoke without imagination, without 
comprehension, without sympathy. It would have been 
easy for any intelligent man with a heart to recall in terms 
of living sympathy the story of Lafayette and of the past 
friendship of France and the United States without in any 

[155] 



way violating our present official neutrality. But Mr. Sharp 
was not the man to do so. 

In the evening, there was a big American dinner at the 
Palais d'Orsay, with perhaps four hundred present. M. 
Viviani, the Prime Minister, spoke gracefully and eloquently, 
and M. Ribot and most of the other members of the Cabi- 
net were seated at the speakers' table. Once more we had 
to listen to our Ambassador's ill-timed stories about Ohio 
politics, his rambling, inappropriate, undignified anecdotes 
and jokes. What a descent from the days when Franklin 
and Jefferson and Jay represented their country in France! 
Many Americans could not listen to him, but left the ban- 
quet hall and strolled in the foyer, until he had finished. 
It was hard for them to know when that had occurred, for 
he received little applause and that polite and perfunctory. 
Fortunately, another American, Professor Mark Baldwin, 
was listed to speak, and he happily expressed in a few well- 
turned phrases what we all felt. His every sentence was 
punctuated by tumultuous applause, applause louder and 
longer, because of the contrast with what had gone before. 
When he spoke of " questions and occasions about which no 
intelligent and high-minded man can afford to be neutral," 
the audience stood up and cheered, and cried, "Right," 
"True," "Bravo," and the gentleman from Elyria looked 
very grave, and Mr. Bacon, only a little way from him at 
the speakers' table, beamed with satisfaction. 

Apropos of the Fourth of July and the sympathy of France 
and America, I want to append the telegram which the 
prefect of Nancy sent to our men in Pont-a-Mousson on our 
national holiday. It read as follows : — 

En ce jour ou vous celebrez la fete de votre Independance 
Nationale, a l'heure meme ou dans de rudes combats la France 
defend son independance contre un ennemi dont la folie de 
domination menace la liberte de tous les peuples, et dont les 



procedes barbares menacent les conquetes morales de la civ- 
ilisation, je vous adresse l'expression des profoodes sympathies 
francaises pour votre grande et genereuse nation, et je saisis 
cette occasion de vous presenter de nouvelles assurances de 
la gratitude emue des populations lorraines pour le devoue- 
ment admirable de tous les membres de l'Ambulance Ameri- 
caine de Pont-a-Mousson. 

I like, too, what the French papers of a few days ago 
quoted President Lawrence Lowell as saying at the Harvard 
commencement. It was something like this: "Our thoughts 
night and day are with those who are fighting on the other 
side of the sea. Each morning brings us terrible news of the 
many youths who will never wake again. They are doing 
their duty. They are sacrificing themselves that civilization 
may endure. To-morrow, perhaps, we shall be at their side 
in the trenches. But even to-day, we have our part in their 
war"; and to make sure that no one could misunderstand 
to which side he referred, he added: "Who knows whether, 
among those thousands of martyrs, there is not another 
Louis Pasteur?" "The achievements of these heroes," he 
continued, "who are falling on the fields of battle, will be 
our heritage. It is for us that they are dying." If only 
Woodrow Wilson could realize the same truth ! 



XLVI 

Neuilly, July 8, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

The other day, when I was in the abandoned trenches in 
the wooded hills above Metzeral in Alsace, I picked up a 
number of letters and postals among the debris left by the 
soldiers — French and German — in their dugouts and sub- 
terranean holes. Here are a few of them which may interest 
you. Here is also a German soldier's diary, begun August 1 
last and coming down to June of this year, when he was 
probably killed; also a letter taken of! a German soldier's 
body, pierced by a bullet-hole. 

The enclosed letter, just received, from Ambassador 
Jusserand refers to a pine branch from Alsace that I sent 
him six weeks or so ago. The clipping about it which unex- 
pectedly appeared in the " Intransigeant " the other day 
may also interest you. 

Ambassade de la Republique Franqaise aux Etats-Unis, 

Washington, le 12 Juin, 1915. 
My dear Mr. Andrew: 

I have been kept so extremely busy of late that I could not 
tell you at once, as I wanted, how deeply touched and moved 
we had been, both my wife and myself, by the unique, memor- 
able, lovable gift which Mr. Charles Carroll brought to us from 
you. 

The Alsatian branch of a pine tree is being framed and will 
appear in our Embassy as one of our most cherished souvenirs. 
Your card pasted on the side of it will ever remind us of how 
near a French heart an American heart can be. 

When you have time, give us news of what is going on, and 
then news of yourself and of your work. Even if I answer you 
irregularly, it will be one more work of mercy for you to do so. 

A new military attache has just been sent me who was for 
months at the front in Flanders and elsewhere, so that I have, 



from the military point of view, fresh news and impressions. 
They are, thank Heaven, of the most favorable description. 
Believe me, with best regards and heartfelt thanks, 

Very truly yours, 

Jusserand. 

Excerpt from Ulntransigeant, July 6, iQij 
NOS VRAIS AMIS 

Mme Jane Catulle Mendes est allee, on le sait, porter en 
Amerique la bonne parole francaise. 

Elle etait l'autre jour a l'ambassade de France a Washington, 
ou elle avait demande audience a M. Jusserand. Pendant 
qu'elle attendait dans un salon tout decore d'admirables ceuvres 
d'art francaises, son attention fut attiree par une branche de 
sapin encore fraiche, ornee d'un ruban tri-colore, et d'ou. 
montait une forte et exquise odeur de seve. A l'un des rameaux 
de l'arbuste, une carte etait attachee, on y pouvait lire: 

" J'ai cueilli cette branche hier pour vous dans V Alsace redevenue 
francaise pour toujour s." 

Et cette carte etait signee: A. Piatt Andrew. 

"Ainsi," nous ecrit Mme Catulle Mendes qui nous conte 
cette emouvante anecdote, "je voyais pour la premiere fois, 
je touchais une branche d'arbre de l'Alsace francaise, et c'est 
en Amerique que cette emotion m'etait reservee! Ai-je besoin 
de vous dire que mes yeux s'emplirent de larmes. ..." 

Nous aimons a reposer notre esprit sur ce trait qui peint si 
eloquemment l'active et sensible amitie americaine pour la 
cause de la France et sa confiance dans notre victoire finale 
sur les barbares. 



XLVII 

Boulogne-sur-Mer, July 12, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

I have been up again with our northern section — my old 
section — and am on my way back to Paris. Since my last 
visit Dunkirk has again been bombarded by the long-range 
guns, and the little city that was so thronged with people 
in the winter is now more deserted than ever. Most of the 
stores have their shutters drawn, or their windows, shattered 
by the concussion of near-by explosions, are boarded over. 
The majority of the civilians — all, I presume, who could af- 
ford it — have departed, and the town is no longer filled 
by the thousands of soldiers who enlivened its streets a few 
months ago. The beautiful old church of St. Eloi, where I 
used in January and February to go to the midday mass on 
Sunday, and which on those occasions used to be brilliant 
with the uniforms of soldiers, and where I used to enjoy the 
music and the peaceful atmosphere of the service, is now 
only a ruin, the Germans having succeeded in hitting it with 
two of their four hundred and twenty shells. 

Perhaps a dozen buildings throughout the city have been 
destroyed. As a protection for the people the mayor has 
marked the available cellars on each block by red flags and 
painted signs, "Refuge en cas d'alerte." So, if the shells 
begin to arrive, one has only to run to the nearest red flag 
and there find a welcoming door leading to a cellar. This, 
however, offers no guarantee that one may not be buried 
alive under masses of debris. 

The bombardments in Dunkirk are rather terrifying. The 
last one continued from three in the morning until six in 
the evening, shells dropping at irregular intervals of half 
an hour, or an hour, or sometimes oftener, — in all about 

C1601 



forty-six. They come from twenty-two miles away, and in 
their journey rise several miles in the air, so that to all 
intents and purposes these enormous projectiles, weighing a 
ton and a half and tall as a man, drop like meteors out of the 
sky. It appears that now the people in Dunkirk have con- 
siderable warning that a shell is on the way, for some one 
telephones from our trenches in the vicinity of the German 
lines to Dunkirk as the shell leaves, and at Dunkirk a siren 
whistles the warning, and then the people have nearly a 
minute to find shelter while the shell is on the way! ! ! 
You can imagine that it is rather exciting, for almost every 
day that the city is bombarded a dozen people are killed 
and others wounded. Yet many go on with their usual occu- 
pations. Madame Benoist d'Azy told me that on the day of 
the last bombardment, which began at 3 a.m., she remained 
in her bed until the usual hour, and then went about to the 
hospitals as on other days. She remains always cheerful, 
fearless, and gayly fatalistic. Our boys, too, did their work 
just as ordinarily that day, except that they had the added 
work of picking up the people killed and wounded in the 
streets. As soon as a shell arrived, our little cars were seen 
running through the town to find what they could do for 
those who might be hurt, quite regardless of the possible 
arrival of another shell in the same locality. Every one in 
the war zone becomes fatalistic about the hazards of war. 
" If I am going to be hit, I am going to be hit," one thinks, 
just as one thinks on the North Shore when the lightning 
is flashing on a summer afternoon. 

I went on, too, to Coxyde and Nieuport where some of 
our boys are working. Nieuport presents still the strangest 
sight of my experience — a whole city destroyed, not by 
fire, but by bombardment. Not a roof remains intact. The 
churches, the city hall, stores, schools, everything wrecked. 
Shells still drop here and there within the city every day, 



and not a civilian remains there, yet, curiously enough, there 
are still people living on the neighboring farms and the fields 
are cultivated. I lunched with Colonel Quinton, who is in 
charge of the artillery of this division, in the little farmhouse 
which is his headquarters, and he took me around among 
his batteries, which are well concealed among the sand dunes. 
One thing I saw yesterday which I had never seen before — 
a man-carrying kite. It was a windy day and the usual 
sausage balloons which they send up for observation pur- 
poses would not have been available. Instead, they had a 
series of box kites carrying a basket in which the observer 
sat. They tell me that the swinging of the observer in one 
of these baskets is most unpleasant. 

Around the church in Nieuport the graves have multiplied 
manyfold since I was last here, and as most of the soldiers 
here are "fusiliers marins" drawn from the sailorfolk of 
Brittany, where the cult of the dead is very highly developed, 
the graves have been decorated with everything that the 
town has to offer. There are graves framed in bedsteads, 
graves decorated with tiles from the floors of neighboring 
houses arranged in the form of a cross with borders, and 
every kind of vase and utensil has been used to hold flowers 
and plants, and all kinds of statues and bric-a-brac are care- 
fully grouped about the head and foot of the graves. 

It is hard for us now to look upon a devastated city like 
Nieuport, and to visualize the anguish that it represents, 
the thousands of women and children who have had to 
abandon their homes and their household treasures, of which 
nothing of value now remains, who trailed out on foot to 
neighboring towns with the little they could carry, like vaga- 
bonds, and who are now homeless and living on other 
people's charity, — the thousands of youths who have been 
mangled and torn here and who have given their arms, or 
their legs, or their eyes, or their lives. One simply cannot 

Ci6a3 



realize that it is all real and not a spectacle. The reality- 
flashes over you only for instants, and then you comprehend 
what a scourge to the human race the ambition of the Hohen- 
zollern family has been. 

Neuilly, Tuesday, July 13, 191$. 

I got back to Neuilly yesterday evening. To-day word 
came of trouble in our tent section — a serious state of de- 
moralization because of their inactivity. So they want me 
to start right off east, and I shall leave to-morrow. 

With much love to you both. I have just got your letters 
of June 27 and 28, one enclosing a moss rose from my garden. 
How I should like to see that garden ! 



XLVIII 

Vittel (Vosges), July 18, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Once more I am returning from the east. I have visited 
the sections at Pont-a-Mousson, Pagny, and in Alsace, and 
am now headed again for Paris, which we left on the morning 
of the 14th. As we left, an imposing cortege was conveying 
the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the composer of the immortal 
"Marseillaise," from the Arc de Triomphe, where the body 
had been lying in state, to the Invalides. Two great voices 
from the Opera, a soprano and a tenor, with a great chorus 
and a military band, had stirred the thousands of listeners 
with that incomparable song, the words of which are so ap- 
propriate to this time when a great section of France is under 
the heel of a brutish invader. With the artillery marching 
between rows of glittering cavalry and aeros flitting like 
great bird guardians overhead, the procession was moving 
down the Champs Elysees as we left Paris. You will have 
read, long before this reaches you, President Poincare's 
great speech, intended not merely for those who heard it, 
but for the soldiers and people of France and for the world, 
declaring the unshakable intention of the government to 
push the war to victory and to rid the world of the German 
peril, no matter what it may cost in men and money and no 
matter how long the struggle may last. 

That night in Pont-a-Mousson, we were sitting in the 
twilight in the garden back of the barracks with our boys 
when some one said, "Listen." Once more we heard the 
"Marseillaise," this time sung by the soldiers in the trenches 
only half a mile away. No one spoke, but every one, I am 
sure, was moved as we heard the distant voices and recalled 
the words — "Contre nous de la tyrannie l'etendard sang- 

[164]" 



lant est leve"; then, "Aux armes, citoyens," "Marchons! 
Marchons!" and at the end that wonderfully tender verse 
beginning, "L'amour sacre de la patrie." And we thought 
how, that night, those same words and that wonderful 
martial song, the most stirring melody that ever was written, 
were being chanted along five hundred miles of battle-line 
by millions of French soldiers. 

They had scarcely finished up in the wood on the hill 
when, "boom, boom, bur-r-r- bub, bub, bub, bub, boom," rifles 
spluttered, grenades exploded, cannon barked, mitrailleuses 
trilled. An attack was under way, and we knew that up 
there men were cutting their way through the barbed wire, 
were charging at each other with bayonets, knives, rifles, 
and hand grenades, as they do night after night, and night 
after night. I got on one of the ambulances and went up to 
Clos Bois, a little villa on the edge of the wood which is 
used as a dressing-station, and sitting on the lee side of the 
villa as we waited for the wounded to be brought in, we 
listened to the roar of the cannon (one of our batteries of 
"soixante-quinze" was quite near), and now and then we 
heard the spent bullets hitting in the trees and bushes around 
us. That night our men carried in more than one hundred 
and fifty wounded, but it was only a small attack. On one 
day of last week our men had carried nine hundred and 
ninety-seven wounded — and so it goes. 

How one hopes that those who are responsible for this 
prodigious agony — baffling all human power of compre- 
hension — will find their just punishment ! 

Paris, July 22, 191 5. 
From Pont-a-Mousson I went on into Alsace. We have 
more than twenty ambulances there now, and the army ad- 
ministration has withdrawn the French ambulances, so we 
Americans alone are carrying all the wounded in Alsace. 

[165] 



Our boys are doing a wonderful work, climbing up over 
mountain passes which no other automobile ambulances 

have crossed before. At I had tea with General 

Maud'huy, who planned the recent French offensive in 
Alsace, — a charming gentleman, reputed a great officer. 
He knew all about our work and spoke very appreciatively 
of what our men were doing in Alsace. Of course, he asked 
about Wilson and the late lamented Bryan, and I was forced 
to tell him what I thought. All intelligent Frenchmen, like 
all intelligent Americans, are surprised that our government 
brooks the long delays and persistent evasions (not to men- 
tion the perjured testimony and false statements) of the 
German Government, but Frenchmen are too courteous to 
express their opinions freely. It goes without saying that 
they cannot respect our government, but they are profoundly 
grateful for our individual help and they only speak of that. 



XLIX 

Neuilly, July 25, iqi$. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

The President's third (or is it the fourth?) Lusitania note, 
which appeared to-day, is firm enough — but what does it 
all amount to? The note last February was equally firm, 
when he said that he would hold the German Government 
"strictly accountable " for any American life or vessel lost 
through their submarine policy. In the Lusitania one hun- 
dred and twenty-nine lives were lost, and several American 
vessels have been sunk, and now, nearly six months after, 
he says that if any more lives are lost, he will consider it 
"unfriendly." . . . 



[167] 



Glisolles, La Bonneville, July 31, IQIS- 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Once more I have been up in Belgium, and again we are 
homeward bound. The trip has been comparatively unevent- 
ful and quite without thrills. There is very little fighting 
in the north now, or for that matter anywhere along the line, 
and I begin to see the possibility of perhaps getting home 
for a fortnight before long. Although the papers periodically 
publish reports of a German concentration of troops in 
preparation for another effort to break through to Calais, 
these reports are generally discredited as from German 
sources intended to deceive. We saw two Taubes being 
attacked by land guns — a sight which eight months ago 
would have been thrilling enough, but which to-day excites 
literally only momentary interest. You hear a mitrailleuse 
in the distance, and you see groups of soldiers looking up. 
Way up in the sky you see something that looks like a fly, 
and all about it puffs of white smoke from the exploding 
shells sent up by the mitrailleuse. You watch it for half a 
minute, and go on with whatever you are doing. 

I found that Colonel Morier had moved our boys of the 
northern section, as indeed he promised me on my last visit 
that he would do, to a place in Belgium called Crombeke, 
where they will serve a region all by themselves, and where 
they can work in several different groups between the dress- 
ing-stations along the Yser Canal, and the field hospitals. 
As there is little happening just now in this region, they have 
very little to do, but they are excellently situated to get 
serious work as soon as things open up again. They are 
located on a farm, and living roughly as they might in a 

Cx68] 



summer camp. They sleep either in the loft of a barn, or 
in their cars, or on the ground in an open field out of doors. 
I tried the latter alternative, and would have slept fairly 
well, except that the cows shortly after dawn were continu- 
ously trying to eat the straw under our blankets, and at 
intervals of a few minutes I was awakened by a bovine nose 
or hoof in near proximity to my head. 

M. de Clermont-Tonnerre always accompanies me on my 
trips. He is an agreeable and well-informed companion and 
helps, through his wide acquaintance with people and cus- 
toms, in many ways. Through him we also frequently find 
comfortable lodging and good repasts while en route. On 
the way up north, we stopped for lunch at a chateau at 
Achy, near Beauvais, where an aunt of his lives. It was a 
nice old place, with pretty vistas of woods and meadows 
and running water, the chateau a charming, homelike coun- 
try place, built, I should suppose, in the eighteenth century, 
and now somewhat run down because of depleted fortunes. 
The old duchess, perhaps eighty years old, a spinster daugh- 
ter, and an invalid son of about forty-five, live there alone. 
Another son is a colonel in the army, and they have not seen 
him for a year, but as we had seen him last week in Alsace, 
they were eager to know about him. "Did he look well?" 
"Was he thinner or heavier than he used to be?" "Had he 
aged much?" The duke was plied with questions. 

Last September the Germans came very near to Achy, 
passing through on the road about a mile away. The daugh- 
ter told me how her mother had refused to move at their 
approach, or even to allow the servants to pack their paint- 
ings and silver and 6b jets d'art. She intended to meet the 
Germans at her door, and if she was to be turned out of her 
home by them, it should be by force. Fortunately, they never 
arrived. She had stayed in Paris during all of the siege of 
1870, and, in fact, the frail, under-sized son, who still lives 

D6 9 ] 



with her, was born there during those terrible days, and 
that was the reason for his not being strong. 

On the way back from Dunkirk, I rode part of the way 
with Colonel Morier, who happened to be coming in his 
motor in the same direction, and we had an interesting talk. 
He has been a warm friend ever since I first arrived in Dun- 
kirk last January, and I always stop for a moment at his 
office when passing through. From all accounts, he is leaving 
Dunkirk to become a general in some other part of the line, 
and he said " good-bye " as if for a long time. 

I left him at St. Omer, and got into my own motor, and 
on the way back de Clermont-Tonnerre invited us to spend 
the night in his chateau at Glisolles, near Evroux, from which 
I am now writing. It is another beautiful country place, 
not as old or thick-walled or formidable as the one at Ancy- 
le-Franc, where we stayed a month ago, but much more home- 
like — just a nice old eighteenth-century country home, with 
a fine old stone staircase, old furniture, and the walls covered 
with family portraits and old prints. The surrounding coun- 
try is rolling, and from my window I look out over quite 
a panorama of wooded hills and steepled villages nestling 
among woods and meadows and yellow fields. It is all so 
dreamlike and charming and remote from war that I have 
taken a whole day off. This morning the duke and his two 
young daughters and Freeborn and I, accompanied by three 
Russian wolfhounds and an amusing pet monkey, made a 
pilgrimage to a lake down in a neighboring valley, and we 
took our bathing-suits and had a swim, and came back 
ravenously hungry to a lunch of delicious vegetables and 
fresh fruits. It seemed like a real summer holiday in America 
in times of peace. 

To-morrow we are off again for Paris — about two and a 
half hours from here. This is the harvest-time, and it is 
interesting, as we drive across the country, to see the women 

[17° 3 



and children and old men driving reapers and heaping the 
sheaves of wheat. Yesterday I passed an old, white-haired, 
white-bearded man, with a feeble, white-haired woman, 
binding sheaves of wheat, and several times I have seen nuns 
working in the harvest fields. Every one in France is doing 
his or her share to keep things going and to help rid their 
country of the invaders. If only the days of miracles were 
not past and the swine could be driven into the sea ! 

P.S. Did you read Owen Wister's "Pentecost of Calam- 
ity" in the "Saturday Evening Post" for July 3 ? It is very 
good. I wish that German-Americans generally could read 
it. It is so devoid of prejudice against Germany and the 
Germans of other days. 

Also do get and read "Ordeal by Battle," by Frederick 
Scott Oliver, — author of the famous life of Alexander 
Hamilton, — one of the best books on conditions in Eng- 
land before and during the war. It contains many lessons 
for us Americans on the need of preparing in time. 



LI 

Neuilly, August 5, 1915. 
Dear Mother and Father: 

Two fine long letters came from H. D. S. this week and 
four from you (the last dated July 21), all of which helped 
to make me happy. The mail always comes in a great batch 
on Tuesdays, and if I am in Paris on that day, I go down to 
Morgan-Harjes and devour everything greedily on the spot. 
Then, at night, when I get back to my little apartment, it 
is good to read it all over again at leisure. 

I am sending to you by a friend who is going over to the 
States this week two rolls containing lithographed drawings 
of the war by various French artists, which, I think you 
will agree, are very fine both in execution and in conception. 
The sketches by Forain are particularly good, and I only 
wish that every one in America could see those referring 
to the Lusitania massacre. French artists are portraying the 
human aspect of the war with such tenderness and pathos 
as will perpetuate the sympathy of the world for France, 
and the abhorrence of the world for "Kultur" for genera- 
tions to come. Most of their drawings (except in the very 
cheap journals) are touched rather with tenderness than 
with hate, but their very tenderness and reserve accen- 
tuate the grossness and brutality of a people whose school- 
children are taught hymns and prayers of hate, and whose 
church bells gayly carolled the massacre of the twelve hun- 
dred innocent passengers on the Lusitania. I have been 
tempted to send to Woodrow Wilson a copy of the Forain 
drawing of the bodies of women and children washed up on 
the beach from the Lusitania. One poor bedraggled creature, 
still alive, is lifting herself from the midst of her dead com- 
patriots and crying, "How our Wilson will avenge us!" 



Little did she know "our Wilson"! If the picture really got 
beyond Tumulty's waste-basket and reached the President's 
hands, might it conceivably help him to see his own and 
America's ignominy as most of the rest of the world see it? 

I lunched to-day at the Siegfried's with several men high 
in public life here in France, and over the cigars after lunch- 
eon, they asked the usual question: "Eh bien, Monsieur 
Andrew, what about the United States and your Mr. Wil- 
son? " "And your Mr. Bryan, is he considered a great states- 
man?" "And your Ambassador, Mr. Sharp, what has been 
his diplomatic career?" 

I love my country. I am proud of her past. I have great 
dreams for her future, but, somehow or other, I must con- 
fess it beyond my power to defend the policies of "our" 
Mr. Wilson, or the competence of men like "our" Mr. Bryan 
and "our" Mr. Sharp, whom he has chosen for positions 
of the highest responsibility. Jealous for my country and 
wanting always to defend her, I am unhappy, indeed, when 
I think of the role she has been forced into by her repre- 
sentatives in this the most crucial, transitional period of all 
the world's history. 



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